There Are Evil People In This World

SPOLIER ALERT: THIS IS NOT A FUN POST.

I'm not a religious guy, owing to circumstances that wouldn't interest you. I believe in a higher power and all, but not being attached to any particular faith and having gotten a UC education, I tend not to buy into a whole lot of handed-down rules other than the Golden one. A law school friend of mine had his own issues with religion, but married a more-or-less lapsed Mormon and found himself struggling with her family's faith. He described his philosophy to me one day as follows: "There are a lot of religions and I don't know which one is right, so I just try to treat people well and do what I think is right." He and his wife eventually divorced, although not over religion, but I have always liked his philosophy.

All of that being said, however, there are times when you just have to recognize that there are evil, evil people out there.

Today's confirmation came from Iraq, where else? I thought that the invasion was a stupid idea at the beginning and now am just one guy in about 85% of the American population that thinks that it was a stupid idea in retrospect. It drives me nuts that my kids are going to be paying for it, financially and possibly geopolitically, in that Iraq has sure managed to get a lot of people angry at our country. What Iraq such a difficult issue, however, is that you can't deny that at least some of the people who our troops are fighting over there are plain evil.

Yesterday, bombs in Iraq killed something like 30 people, the worst daily toll in a while. I saw that squib on my Yahoo home page and it made me queasy. When I read the article in today's paper, I wanted to puke. Apparently, after looking at the severed heads of the presumed bombers and talking to witnesses who had seen them before they exploded, the relevant authorities determined that the bombers actually were female beggars with Downs syndrome who someone had convinced to wear jackets of explosives during their daily begging in the market, someone who then detonated the explosives via remote control. No adjective is sufficient here.

Because of the Mermaid, I am very sensitive to the treatment of people with disabilities. You do not need to have a child with a disability, however, to recognize evil when you see it. I grew up during the Cold War and it was scary, thinking about all of those nuclear-tipped Soviets missiles pointed at us. The Soviets did some bad things, but they never sent planes to crash into our buildings and I don't ever remember hearing about them taking advantage of disabled people as bombers. It's a different thing out there in the world and we just need to recognize it for what it is.