In his third installment of “The Cho Factor,” Robert Ringer discusses the topic of “evil.” He was inspired to this topic by a broadcast of “CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute” that he saw. He talks about how he tuned in just in time to see the presentation of an award to a young man who helped barricade a door to a classroom at Virginia Tech during the Cho shooting spree. In the presentation a comment was made about how this student had “confronted evil and won” – and this got Ringer to wondering about evil versus human action.
This is a very interesting subject to talk about. So often we tend to talk about abstract “evil” rather than the person who does the evil act. As Ringer points out, it’s easier to talk about an abstract than about a real human with inner motivations – motivations that might make it harder for the rest of us to simply dismiss the entire action as being something “evil” that we had to face but can now go past.
Even now, as I write this, the news programs are showing coverage of a new shooting – the fourth this week – at Northwest Illinois University where a friend of mine is enrolled. No doubt we will be hearing of how these students also had to “face evil” in the shape of an apparent former graduate student.
So, we have Cho, this new shooter, and a litany of other names of young people who made the decision to take multiple lives, including their own. If we take Ringer’s definition of evil – “a purposeful intent or act…to do harm to others” – then these have all been evil actions. But, as Ringer points out, what about the people themselves? Is it, to paraphrase Shakespeare (as Ringer hints at), a case of “Some are born evil, some achieve evil, and some have evil thrust upon ’em”?
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