Sunday, March 26/17
So my son came home last Saturday from his week in Europe and I can't begin to say how happy I was to see him after almost 2 weeks.
I know many of you will say to yourself that two weeks isn't that long to be apart and you are right, but I can't help feeling a tad bit lost when I don't see my kids at least once a week. I honestly don't know how C dealt with not seeing her boys as much as she used to when they lived with her and am pretty sure it caused her some inner pain that she never shared with me, not because she thought I wouldn't care or try and help her deal with it but because she was and is a private person.
I only had him for Saturday night as last week was technically his week to be with his mom so I made the most of it by talking to him about his trip as we drove home and over dinner as well.
He had a great time, learned quite a bit about the various cities and regions they visited, and enjoyed sampling new foods, as well as getting to visit Venice and having real Italian pizza once again, his words not mine.
The one somber moment came when he talked about the visit to Dachau.
I won't go into any details other than to say I think that visit made him a better person.
He's always been an empathetic young man but I think this opened his eyes to the world outside of Canada and the evil that man can do when left alone. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying evil can't or doesn't exist in Canada but I don't think it exists to the same extent we've seen in other places.
I'm sure aboriginal Canadians will disagree with me but that isn't the topic of this entry today.
His one question to me was "How could this happen dad?"
That has to be one of the toughest questions any parent can ever be asked by their child.
How can such evil exist and do the horrible things it did on such a grand scale.
I told him I would need some time to think about this one as it wasn't a question I felt could be answered off the cuff.
I've thought about it a lot this week knowing it would come up again this weekend when he transitioned back to my place on Friday.
Here is the answer I gave him yesterday as we were sitting at East Side Mario's having lunch.
We are all born without the ability to know right from wrong. One person's right is another person's wrong depending on the view point.
What makes us who we are is the environment from which we develop. Your mother and I have done our best to show you and your sister how to view and treat people. You are for the most part a product of your upbringing and it shows in how much you care for other people.
Even though we are all born without the ability to know right from wrong we are all born with two seeds inside us: goodness and evil.
For the majority of people, that goodness comes to the forefront and lets us become members of our society, but there is a small minority that embrace the evil and all that it offers them. they love the disarray that comes with hurting other people. They appeal to that seed in everyone around them to promote a philosophy knowing that it will only take a few to let that theme catch on.
We are good at hiding and controlling that evil so that it doesn't take over our lives. some better than others but for the most part we manage to control it.
Some people deal with this evil seed by letting it out via a bad temper. My step father was like that and up till I was eighteen I kept my distance and hoped I wouldn't become that which I feared.
Here was a man that would lose his temper at the drop of a hat and respond with violence. Never against me or my mother, well not usually, but rather at things around him. It was not uncommon for him to find something not working out like he wanted and respond by throwing a tool across the room, regardless of who might be around, or smash his fist into a wall. I grew up learning that the appropriate response to something going wrong was to throw things around and swear like there was no tomorrow.
I learned how to behave that way but rejected letting it become my own modus operandi thanks to a inner strength I never knew existed and the influence of my maternal grandfather, a man who showed me how to properly act and behave, a man I miss so much each day, and a man I've tried to emulate as much as possible in how I deal with setbacks in my life.
Man as a species is capable of committing the most horrible acts upon one another. Acts we've come to know by such names as the Rape of Nanjing, Holocaust, Armenian Genocide, Massacre of Rwanda, and the Reign of Pol Pot in Cambodia.
There are others but those stand out from recent history.
There are more than enough acts of goodness to offset those tragedies but they don't make for good news and are never reported.
We are capable of horrific behavior and yet are lucky enough to also be capable of wonderful acts of charity to one another that on the whole move us forward as a society.
When people get scared they react without thinking about the world around them.
Dachau and such camps came about because people were afraid of the world around them and willing to overlook such things as the price to pay for the establishment of order and prosperity in difficult times, times where competing political philosophies battled for supremacy and went against everything they were taught to view as right.
Edmund Burke said it best......."All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing"
More often than not evil triumphs because good is afraid to stand up and be heard, almost as if being good is a bad thing.
Sometimes doing the right thing requires us to be a bit uncomfortable, to stand out, to be seen or heard when all we'd rather do is keep a low profile.
Sometimes I think we've moved past the stage of letting something like Dachau ever happen again only to read about the Rwandan Genocide or the tragedy that became the former Yugoslavia.
Hopefully we can continue to evolve and do the right thing, but until such time as we can do that I guess the burden lies within each of us to continue to fight that good fight and make sure evil can never triumph.........................
Marcus
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