October 7, 2024
Dear editor;
This is a response to Reader’s Voice, October 3, “…Good Versus Evil.”
Mr. Len Wass’ opinion begins with a well-deserved accolade for an eighth-grade student’s September 19 Reader’s Voice describing the fear of gun violence he and his classmates endure each day at school. The young writer eloquently describes the pain they feel, and proposes common-sense gun safety standards.
Mr. Wass’ suggests that needless violence with guns and needless violence with clubs and knives are somehow similar since neither guns nor knives and clubs caused the violence, a specious argument at best, and one that I am certain offers no solace to our eighth-grade students, parents, and victims. Just ask them.
Faster than you can say “Fox News,” the narrative of his opinion changes to “good versus evil”: To resolve the fears that many have, “we need to combat evil and overcome it.” He believes “our nation’s culture to be infiltrated by evil”. Then, out comes the old MAGA standbys and dog whistles, BLM, ANTIFA, “the millions of unchecked immigrants” and all the terrorists and rapists they embody, all of whom whose violence is somehow allowed and condoned! That would be a lot of evil, if it were true instead of being fictitious talking points. I suppose evil is in the eye of the beholder.
In my mind’s eye, evil is manifested by man’s inhumanity to man and our inability to stop it. It grows from the fertile ground of greed and ignorance, where anger mutates from fear and when left unchecked, explodes into hatred, rage and violence. We must individually recognize these roots of evil within ourselves, however painful; pointing fingers at others and in turn demonizing them as “not one of us” is an evil by itself.
Please go in peace.
Dave Hoehne, Aurora