Dorothy Richmond is founder of the Dear Neighbor column and a longtime resident of Cedar-Isles-Dean.
Dear Neighbor,
Two days after Alex Pretti was killed and two weeks after Renee Good suffered the same fate, I heard Sen. Rafael Warnock of Georgia interviewed, and he said something that haunted me:
“Evil always goes too far, containing the seed of its own destruction.”
It is hard not to sense evil in these killings.
I have long been fascinated by the concept of evil. As a philosophy major in college, we often discussed good and evil, and it was always engrossing.
The best sermon I have ever heard was long ago. I was 27, and the day before I had driven up from St. Louis to move back to Minnesota—a hellish trek of boredom and heat. It was August, and my car, a 1972 Dodge Dart, had no air conditioning. I arrived at my parents’ house outside Northfield late Saturday evening, planning to stay for a few weeks until I could move into my house in St. Paul.
The next morning at 7 a.m., my mother demanded, “Get up, Dorothy, we’re going to Mass.”
“Nooooo!” was all I thought, but I said nothing because going to church was nonnegotiable in my parents’ house. I consoled myself knowing that the 7:30 service was the shortest one— in and out — and I could return and go back to bed.
It was business as usual until the priest said that day’s sermon would be delivered by the deacon, a young seminarian named Lee, younger than I was. I wrote him off, confident that whatever he had to say would be lame and I could zone out.
I was wrong.
Deacon Lee began by asking for a show of hands of anyone who had been to Itasca State Park, the headwaters of the Mississippi River. Hands shot up, including mine, and I recalled one of those standard Minnesota summer vacations up north where I “jumped across the Mississippi River.”
He continued: “Think of this as your infancy. It’s small, gentle, life is easy.”
I was perking up.
“Now imagine yourself in a canoe going down the river. At first it’s simple, as childhood should be. You paddle downstream and when you’re tired you pull over to one side or the other to rest. After a while, however, the river gets wider and more complicated, like life.
“One day you’re tired in the middle of the river, needing rest. But you realize it’s the last day you can choose one side or the other. After that, you’ll need to hug one shore and remain close to that side. It’s up to you which side you choose.
“So, it is with good and evil.”
By then I was wide awake. Deacon Lee had just explained the essence of free will.
Evil is never necessary. It is always a choice.
I recently watched “Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial,” a documentary series on Netflix. It was riveting, a semester’s worth of education packed into six one-hour episodes.
I had long known that Adolf Hitler wanted to be an artist, applied to the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and was rejected twice. He was not without talent. While he could render buildings skillfully, he could not draw people.
Think about great portraitists such as Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci, and John Singer Sargent. They captured their subjects’ souls.
Perhaps Hitler’s was already hardened, like the concrete structures he favored, and he could not see or imagine other people’s souls.
It is a choice not to see others’ humanity, to disregard someone else’s happiness or freedom or even life. We can always see a person’s humanity if we want to—if we try.
Hitler did not seek out smart, critical-minded people who could think ethically and engage with him in truth-seeking. Instead, he courted the disenfranchised, unemployed, uneducated, and angry young men who became known as the Sturmabteilung, or Brownshirts, notable for their street violence against “the other.” Hitler gave them voice, purpose, and extremism—the seed that ultimately led to his destruction and theirs.
In his bunker with Eva Braun, his wife of fewer than 24 hours, after Adolf tested the potency of a cyanide pill on his beloved dog, Blondi, they took cyanide. He then shot himself. Some honeymoon.
Which side of life’s river do you choose? The side that celebrates human souls, or the side that denies human souls to anyone who disagrees with you?
However you would put it, choose wisely.
