Thanksgiving and the Face of Evil

When we went to bed last night, my husband suggested we use one of our prayers to just thank God for our many blessings without asking for a single thing.

So I’ve been thinking about what I’m thankful for, and mingled up there at the top of my list which includes family, faith and health is my freedom. Which leads my thoughts to something I’ve been mulling over in my mind the last while.

We just finished another election and both sides are hurling accusations that the other side is ‘evil’.  Now, when I look at the word ‘evil’, I notice it is ‘live’ spelled backwards which pretty much sums up the problem with evil.  Evil is the opposite of live.   Instead of ‘living’, evil is about ‘dying’–dying hope, dying happiness, dying dreams.   Evil is a destructive force, not a creative force; it crushes spirits and suppresses energy.  But the question of the hour is, “What does the face of evil look like?”  Will I recognize it when I see it?

 For example, my daughter visited China awhile back and went to the tomb of Chairman Mao where she joined thousands of Chinese as they reverently filed past his remains.  She learned sometimes a hundred thousand people pass by in a single day.  How could this be?  Wasn’t the man ‘evil’?  Didn’t tens of millions of Chinese die under his brutal hand?  She carefully posed the question to a man next to her, who replied that, yes, many had died.  Mao had flaws.  But what he intended to do was good.  And for that the Chinese honored him.  I had previously read Mao’s own words.  He told the youth that as much as they thought their own fathers loved them, Mao loved them more.

I thought of other brutal dictators of the last century.  Hitler’s aim was for the ‘perfect society’.  He loved beautiful art, beautiful music, beautiful literature.  He was a gifted artist himself.

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter, Rose, saw Lenin up close and personal.  She said he was a “sincere and extremely able man” who dedicated his life to the passionate belief that he could create a society where “insecurity, poverty, and economic inequality shall be impossible.”

How can that be ‘evil’?

I’ve read the writings of Karl Marx.  He had seen firsthand the brutal heartache of poverty.  What if a society could be created so there were no poor among us?  Specifically, what if a mother, now stooped over trying to scrape together a few crusts of bread to feed her starving children could turn her energies to pursuing art and literature?  Is that such an ‘evil’ desire?

And yet, in their passion to do ‘good’, they did the work of pure evil where hopes and dreams were crushed and millions of lives perished in the wake.

So it brings me back to the original question:  What is the line that separates the ‘good’ from the ‘evil’?  What does evil look like? We have many do-gooders among us, all vitally interested in our ‘best good’.  How do we sift the ‘good’ from the ‘evil’ before the damage is done and we experience the fallout of their good intentions?

And this is what I’ve come up with so far.  I’m still applying the idea to  a variety of situations to see if the model works, and I ask you for your help in the experiment.  But so far I haven’t found an exception.   I believe the line separating good from evil comes down to the element of coercion or ‘force’.  You can have the most wonderful intentions in the world, but once you introduce the factor of force to the equation, you have turned those good intentions into evil.

Mao forced his ‘good’ ideas onto the Chinese people.  He destroyed their connections to the ideas of the past by destroying their antiquities and their books–he even had their grass and trees and flowers torn up and destroyed. He needed them to think like him.  He replaced what he destroyed with a little red book everyone was required to carry on their persons at all times and to study diligently.  How many of these ideas found in his little red book do you have a problem with?

“It is important for a country to retain modesty, and shun arrogance.”

“It is the duty of the Party to serve the people.  Without the people’s interests constantly at heart, their work is useless.”

“China’s road to modernization will be built on the principles of diligence and frugality.”

“A communist must be selfless.”

“The multiple burdens which women shoulder are to be eased.”

“In order to get rid of blindness . . . we must . . . learn the method of analysis .”

Hitler promoted motherhood and family. What can be ‘gooder’ than that?  He once said, ‘I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator.”

And in the name of ‘goodness’, these men worked pure evil.

As Rose Wilder Lane summed it up: “The Soviet government exists to do good to its people, whether they like it or not.”

Christianity is a tremendous power for good until it is ‘forced’ upon people.  The Spanish Inquisition comes to mind. Once Spain purged the country of all their perceived ‘evil’, the country died.

 Who would take issue with any of the five pillars of Islam?  They believe in worshiping one God and of praying to him daily; of taking care of the poor; of looking on all people as equal in the eyes of God; of self-restraint.  Yet, once those ideas are ‘forced’ upon people, as some radical  Muslims have taken upon themselves, does it not turn the good into evil?

So if force becomes the line where good crosses into evil, it makes me question the wisdom of things like  compulsory education where learning is forced, for example.   And it certainly makes me examine many of the ideas being put out there by government officials, federal and local, under a new lens.

Obviously the idea needs to be explored a lot more than this and I’ve gone on far too long for a beautiful Thanksgiving morning like today.  But I’ll continue mulling because I pray that next year and the year following and the year after that will still find me writing about my gratitude for being free.

I have a feeling the realization of that prayer may be tied into how many people recognize the face of ‘evil’ for what it truly is before our freedom is lost.