Recognizing the evil men do

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

I was thinking Sunday, as I was reading the papers, giving most of my attention to the pile of flashy, color flyers packed with things to buy, things to give, things that promise to make an old-fashioned Christmas - so much more pleasant than the news - that this is what happened to the Jews in Germany. They didn't pay attention, either. They sat among their families, buffered by them, and pushed away the world, deluded into thinking that what was happening outside their doors could never happen to them.

They were preoccupied, as we are, with life, with celebrations, with birthdays, graduations, and holidays. Our personal lives brim with these small, good, wonderful things.

"Have you ever seen such a report card?"

"Can you believe she is almost 16?"

"Make sure you write and thank your aunt for her gift."

"It won't get any worse," husbands must have whispered to wives, friends must have assured friends, in Berlin and Warsaw and Vienna and Amsterdam a half century ago.

"It's all right that we can not walk in the parks anymore. When did we walk in the parks anyway?"

"So they took away our bicycles. We still have our feet."

"Our children go to separate schools but they are still learning."

"The yellow star isn't all that bad."

"The curfews are bearable. We may not be able to leave our homes to visit one another, but we still have each other."

Why didn't they know, I always wondered. Why didn't they react and scream and fight and organize and put a stop to the evil and save themselves when they could?

Finally I know why. Because they didn't understand evil's strength and tenacity and power. Good men can't, because such evil doesn't exist in them.

"In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart," wrote Anne Frank from her hiding place in an attic, where she lived with her family until the Germans discovered them.

Even when evil is knocking at the door, the good think they are immune. It will get better, they repeat again and again. Only it doesn't get better. It didn't then. It got unbelievably worse. Eleven million people, six million Jews, were systematically exterminated while the world waited for good to prevail.

It can't get worse is what we're telling one another today. Things will change. They have to. But how, if we continue to do nothing?

A 21-year-old Serbian tells how he and two companions gunned down 10 members of a Muslim family, how he raped and looted, how he was trained to slaughter.

Witnesses in Somalia relate how bands of armed men with automatic rifles stalk starving women and children and steal food from them to sell for profit, then kill the children.

In Germany, neo-Nazis are terrorizing refugees, burning their homes, once again killing those who aren't ethnically pure.

At home the quality of life - the overall respect for life - continues to plummet. The night before Thanksgiving, a 20-year-old mother was shot to death by a random bullet outside her Chelsea home. The day after Thanksgiving a Pembroke man confessed to strangling his wife and mother of two. In Cambridge, a man walked up to a car stopped at a traffic light and opened fire with semi-automatic handgun, killing one and wounding two.

Evil is flexing its muscles everywhere and we continue to tolerate it.

This seems to be our curse, that we don't learn from history.

My daughter is playing "Brian's Song" on the piano as I write. She hasn't played in months, and I had forgotten how much I love the sound.

This is what's real for me. This is reality - not the death of a 20-year-old I don't know, not the torture of refugees in Germany. I am limited by my own experience. I am less than the sum of all I know, for I know far more than I believe.

And so I adapt. We all adapt. We lock our doors. We change our habits. We don't walk in parks. We restrict our freedom and we continue singing Christmas songs and going through the same old motions, as if ritual will protect us.

But it won't. It can't. For evil is more than an abstract noun. It's real. It exists.

A man gets a speck of plutonium in his lungs and he dies. But the plutonium lives on to infect men not even born yet. Evil is like this. It always was. It always will be. You have to fight it, not ignore it. Left alone it will swell, and it will spread. It will not go away.