I know. "Evil" sounds so. . . well. . . medieval. But I was driving to work this morning reflecting on this weekend's news. Police discovered the decomposing corpses of seven newborns in a Utah woman's garage. Megan Huntsman had killed the babies, then apparently left their remains stacked up in cartons. Newspaper article after article screamed
why? Just a day or two before, the media was yelling
"why" over the stabbing rampage of a sixteen year old student at Franklin Regional High School in Pennsylvania. After all, his childhood had been described as one in which he grew up in a Brady Bunch family. The gargantuan
question mark in last year's Newtown massacre of elementary school children hung on which subtle combination of mental illnesses did this teen from this "Leave it to Beaver Family" suffer from. As for the Columbine teens, and the Colorado movie theater shooting, mental health professionals are still parsing the wheres and whereforths of these young peoples' mental crises.
And now finally I come to this business of "evil." I have never in all my sixty-four years on this planet read a news article that asked "why" a black teenager committed a crime. Although, if the crime is sufficiently sensational the perpetrator morphs from a criminal into a terrorist.
If we started labelling the perpetrators of all crimes "evil," then at least the media would have to halt that most irritating tendency of making racial distinctions between whites who commit crimes (they must be mentally ill) and blacks, who must be . . . well. . . criminals.
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