Letting evil win by doing nothing

Perhaps the only things more terrifying than the Sept. 11 attacks is Osana Bin Laden gloating about it. There he was on amateur but revealing videotape, snickering as if killing innocent civilians by the thousands was the most natural thing on earth, bragging how he correctly had calculated that jet fuel would melt the steel posts of the World Trade Center’s upper floors to crash the highest portions but relishing the bonus of seeing the entire structure tumble, commending the suicide skyjackers and all their past and future jihads to the glory and goodness of Allah. He can only be evil personified. His oh-so-casual interview with the fawning, ebullient sheik defies belief. They were worse than the vilest gangsters drunkenly reliving the goriest details of their latest caper. Not even the most imaginative films in history on war and pillage have captured the incredible depravity man is capable of showing.

But disbelief is evil’s shrewdest trick. French poet Charles Baudelaire said evil has an uncanny way of making us think it does not exist. By so doing, evil perpetuates itself – from the most unseemly slight of overindulgence during the holidays, to the greed that fuels corruption in government and poverty in our midst, to the butchery that bin Laden and his Al-Qaed "jihadniks" are capable of doing. Evil then becomes a way of life, and man finds the best excuses for evil big and small. Like that teenage boy caught on television news pleading for understanding that he had to snatch a cellphone from a woman and stab her dead when she resisted because he was hungry and needed money for food. Or like Josef Mengele experimenting with human skins for lampshades in the name of art and technology. And like an apologist of bin Laden saying", at least he didn’t bomb Disneyland." Evil slyly erases the divide that separates it from good that we learn to ignore it. Sometimes, we even begin to think that some acts of evil are good. Which is why G.K. Chesterton had to remind us: "The word good has (acquired) many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man."

Thus evil triumphs, not only in disbelief but also in our forgetting it. The military’s present aim, for instance, is to free before Christmas that last remaining hostages from the clutches of Abu Sayyaf terrorists in Basilan. But many seem to have forgotten about their cohort in Sulu, Commander Robot, the brains behind the kidnapping for ransom of a bigger number of foreign hostages last year. Are we to let him now fulfill his dream of lolling in an orange orchard out of millions of pesos he extracted at the expense of Sipadan Island tourists? How about Mayor Ronnie Mitra of Panulukan, Quezon, who was caught escorting a shipment by his lonesome. Are we to let him rot in jail while his financier goes scot free? Perhaps the lesson of prisoners in concentration camps, there exists a worldwide network of Hitler fanatics who claim the Holocaust never happened.

Edmund Burke warned: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." But then, we regard good men as only those who wear habits and deliver homilies in church. To them, we assign the tedious, boring task of doing good. As for us, we can only be excused, for we did not study higher theology, or take perpetual vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.

But are we excused? Is it not everyone’s job to uphold good and shun evil? Of course it is, difficult as that task may be. For, how can we be good every second of the day? Tagalogs have a joke about man being good only when asleep. They crack it perhaps in answer to the biblical preaching that it would be easier for a canel to pass through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to enter Heaven. And yet that task has to be done As Gandhi prescribed: "Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good."

And fight evil we must, whether it is the colossal type of which bin Laden is an expert, or the small infractions we commit each day. If 9/11 has a common message for all peoples of the world, it is that evil not only does exist but that it must not be forgotten and it must be fought. In so doing, we can take solace in the belief that God, while He permits evil to happen, will not let it triumph in the end. That is why we are all gifted with Conscience with which to discern right from wrong, sometimes mechanically, sometimes through deep reflection too. And that’s why we’re all gifted too with Faith, that weapon against evil without which we will have no reason to fight at all. It is faith in God that gives us believe that bin Laden will fail, as with all other acts of the devil deceptively done in the name of God.

Merry Christmas to us all.

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