The evil that men do

By Steve Janoski

"Because some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn." – Alfred Pennyworth, "The Dark Knight"



I finally left the office just after midnight. Ever the night owl, I’ve always found it much easier to get work done when the world is quiet. As I walked to my car, for some reason I recalled how frightened of the dark I was as a child, undoubtedly the product of too many late-night horror movies and an imagination to match.

Foolish now, I thought. After this long, I knew that the real monsters are in this world, not the next, and that the actions of men can be far more unnerving than those of some conjured villain.

Later I would learn that during my brief internal monologue, a lone murderer 1,800 miles away was in the process of gunning down a dozen innocents and wounding scores of others in a Colorado movie theater. The timing is still chilling for me.

Be ready, because what happened in Aurora on Thursday night will be analyzed and reanalyzed ad nauseam for the next few months, and discussions on gun rights, mental healthcare, and the safety and security of society in general will steal to the forefront of every Facebook wall and newspaper website’s comment section.

And shocked citizens will ask that naïve, stupid question — and I have already heard it at least a dozen times — that they always ask whenever something awful happens.

"What is this world coming to?"

Well, let me save you the trouble on this: the world is not coming to anything. It’s not changing, and people were no different when you grew up than they were when Euripides did.

And nobody asked, "What is this world coming to?" when the globe was regularly consumed in titanic wars between first-world superpowers, or when the threat of Indians kicking down the door of your frontier homestead to kill your family was both recognized and real.

But, as this nation and others become ever more civilized, we become more and more appalled by the idea of violence. That, in itself, is a good thing.

But as our aversion to bloodshed becomes increasingly powerful, we forget that there are people out there who do not share that feeling with us, and that many of them would end your life and not give a second thought or feel a minute’s worth of remorse about it.

And it’s either very ironic — but more likely, very planned — that the soulless coward now identified as 24-year-old James Holmes launched his assault as people sat down to watch the finale of a movie series that has wrestled with the issue of human morality and where it stands in the dichotomy of good and evil in an attempt to act as an "agent of chaos" worthy of the Joker’s mantle.

But he’s failed, and failed miserably.

Holmes is no philosophically driven antagonist, no character study on the underside of man. He is merely another brutal psychopath whose blackened husk of a heart is enveloped with a festering darkness that would have found a better home in the torture chambers of Saddam Hussein.

We liberals like to think that all men — and we often stand steadfastly on this — if given the right reasons, can change. We like to think that as long as one draws breath, there is both time and cause for redemption.

But I’ve always known that there are those out there for whom redemption is impossible. They are Judases to the human race, the venomous few whom God has turned away from, and within them lies the same demons that danced in the flames of Troy, pulled the guillotine’s rope in Robespierre’s Paris and herded the Jews into the gas chambers in Nazi Germany.

And, with 7 billion people living on this earth, some are bound to be wired wrong. It’s just a numbers game as to how many James Holmeses are out there among us. When acts like this occur, no one thing can be blamed, other than the fact that evil men commit evil deeds, regardless of time or place.

But never, never ask, "What is this world coming to?"

It’s always been the same. We’ve just forgotten that horrors like this are not only possible, but inevitable. The only thing we can control is how we deal with it once it occurs.

I, for one, suggest we show Mr. Holmes the same level of mercy that he gave his victims.

Email: janoski@northjersey.com