“Crime is a reflection of a nation’s soul. … When criminals and wrongdoing are glamorized in film, on television and in music, the young are introduced to the very things that eat away at society’s foundation.” Cal Thomas

What is there to be learned could be that which we do not want to face or admit. Neil Postman has also commented, “With TV we vault our ourselves into a continuous incoherent present. … In a world of printing, information is the gunpowder of the mind—hence come the censors in their austere robes to dampen the explosion.” Our age, as observed by Czeslaw Milosz (winner of 1980 Nobel Prize for literature) is characterized by a “Refusal to remember”. He cited, among other things the shuttering fact that there are now more than 100 books imprint that deny the Holocaust ever took place. Yet another quote from those who deal with observations of society, historian Carl Schorake has noted “the modern mind has grown indifferent to history because history has become useless to it.” In other words we refuse to learn from history and therefore ignore it.

In the 1940’s Nazi Germany obliterated millions of Jews and we called that a Holocaust. Today, in the last few decades, we have obliterated millions of babies in the name of convenience and choice. Can society do such and not be affected culturally or morally? We need only THINK about what we are doing and have been doing for the past few decades—discredit any moral concepts as being important. "We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst." ---C. S. Lewis

Such killings as those at Virginia Tech, and others like them are [merely] isolated incidents that mirror the Holocaust but on a smaller scale – and they are getting closer to our personal lives. What we do about this is no easy solution but do something we must. Could it be we need to start by realizing spiritual values are important to any society? Why should such experiences (Virginia Tech, Columbine, and the list goes on…) bother us if we are in such a mindset that it doesn’t matter that we have murdered millions of babies for the sake of convenience or because “we have a right to choose”. Who knows the extent of this kind of semantics (or word games) and its affects on society? If it doesn’t matter that we abort babies on the brink of life, why should we find it difficult to understand a student buying a gun and kill over 30 fellow students and then end his own life? After all, we’ve been told “nothing really matters anymore…”, at least that’s the message our casual values leaves. Even if a spiritual revival truly occurred it will take decades, maybe even centuries before we could see the results; but trying the “old fashioned ways” that we’ve been told to cast aside, might be worth it. We will never know unless we try.

"If you pursue evil with pleasure, the pleasure passes away and the evil remains; if you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains." ---Cicero

"How could this great land of plenty produce too few people in the last 30 years? Here is the brutal truth that no one dares to mention: We're too few because too many of our babies have been killed. Over 45 million since Roe
v. Wade in 1973. If those 45 million children had lived, today they would be defending our country, they would be filling our jobs, they would be paying into Social Security. Still, we watch as 3,700 babies are killed every single day in America. It is unbelievable that a nation under God would allow this." ---former Senator Zell Miller

“Why is there evil in the world?
No one ever asks,
Why is there good in the world?”

“Evil originates not in the absence of guilt
but in the effort to escape it.”

M. Scott Peck (1936-2005)

From pages 41 and 76 of “People of the Lie”, A Touchstone Book,
Published by Simon & Schuster, Copyright, 1983 by M. Scott Peck, M.D.

Epilogue by The Wordwright – The losses of those parents and relatives of the victims (at Virginia Tech) are not mere in any sense of the word; my comment, “merely” was specifically in conjunction with the incidents, not the victims or relatives. M. Scott Peck delves deeper yet into the subject of evil in his above mentioned book, on Page 77, saying, “Since they [evil people] will do almost anything to avoid the particular pain that comes from self-examination, under ordinary circumstances the evil are the last people who would ever come to psychotherapy. The evil hate the light – the light of goodness that shows them up, the light of scrutiny that exposes them, the light of truth that penetrates their deception. Psychotherapy is a light-shedding process par excellence.” Some words of the One called the Light of the World can be found by your reading Matthew 6:22-23; Luke 11:34-36 and John 3:19. It seems obvious Dr. Peck’s words had their origin in the truths as found in these Scriptures.

THE WORDWRIGHT