Evil In Our Time

Evil in our time isn't encapsulated in a maniacal dictator with a weird mustache and a funny accent. Evil in our time isn't Darth Vader and his Imperial troops. Evil in our time isn't a grand anti-Christ backed by countless divisions looking to trample our freedoms asunder with brute force.

Not this time...

These are the evils of previous generations. These evils were large, visible, and ultimately, conquered. Many will say proudly that they lived in the ages of Eisenhower, Churchill and Roosevelt.

The pretenders to this kind of evil, men like Saddam and Ahmadinejad, are all dinosaurs. They are anachronistic. Saddam fell in three weeks. Ahmadinejad, from the looks of it, won't even bother going beyond rhetoric.

No, evil in our time is far more sinister than the sound of jackboots on the pavement. Our evils are not large and visible. Our evils are small, but legion, We do not see our evils in smug propaganda posters. We see our evils whenever we look in the mirror. It's the precise, intimate and mundane nature of our evils that make them far more dangerous. Because, we refuse to see them.

We entangle our evils, not in bombastic rhetoric to be spewed out of propaganda loudspeakers, but in the very language of our laws and treatises. The language is technical and boring, which make us ignore it or look over it. Evil seeps in and before we know it, we are already complicit.

Evil in our time is much more dangerous, because the targets are not easy to despise (like a certain mustachioed gent). Rather, the targets appeal largely to our sense of good. Harmless women, professionals, scientists, homosexuals, minorities...these are a far cry from SS Stormtroopers or KGB operatives. They are not the Mighty Other. Evil in our time is manifestly more effective because it has picked the perfect human avatars to shield it from criticism. After all, who wants to criticize the desperate, the deluded, the romantic, the ambitious? Are not these traits a reflection of ourselves? And yet, we must do so, for to yield to evil now means that the next generation will have to suffer for our delusions, our cowardice, our refusal to confront that which is like us.

This is the face of evil in our time. Not a menacing colossus bestriding the globe, but a simple woman, who calls the unborn person she had murdered a "sea monkey". And this woman, she is legion. More painfully, this woman is us.

Not as awe-inspiring, but every bit as insidious as a Nazi poster...

This evil does not traffic in dramatic gestures. It does not kill good "to the sound of thundering applause". No, it destroys good with a snarky, brainless soundbite, with a poorly-conceived blog, with a simple, painless rationalization. It hides within the thickets of our compassion and our desire to be edgy. The sheer irony of this is that we will ultimately be destroyed by that misguided compassion, that makes the many small compromises with evil that will eventually consume us all. It will not take a great dictator to declare us all mere "sea monkeys". All it will take is a bureaucrat of a democratically-elected government. All it will take is something so harmless as a desperate woman.

Welcome to the brave new world. And if you think that we are safe here in the Philippines, well...

Welcome to the world of Edsel Lagman.