Our changing definition of evil
I hope and pray that Joe Soucheray really doesn’t believe the headline of his column April 26 (”They chose evil. ‘Outreach’ programs can’t change that”). Other than the fact that he doesn’t use the term The Great Satan, he could have found some of his hopeless thinking and desperate language about evil in the training manuals of the very jihadists he castigates.
Or he might have sifted through Pioneer Press archives and copied similar headlines and columns about whoever we have fought in war, whether it was American Indians, Germans, Japanese, North Vietnamese, Taliban or Iraqis. Journalists often have been at the front of the pack to label our enemies as godless, evil monsters incapable and undeserving of any basic consideration or respect. In so doing, we can maintain the class structures that perpetuate injustice and almost impossible living circumstances. That rationale also eases our conscience when we shoot off indiscriminate bombs from drone aircraft directed from thousands of miles away. Mr. Soucheray must be aware that our national definition of evil changes almost on a daily basis depending on whom we are supplying with bombs and bullets.
Mr. Soucheray, a direct recipient of the largest and most generous outreach program in world history (American male white privilege), posits that outreach programs won’t work in this case for six Minnesota men of Somali descent. The closest he can muster to empathy or understanding is the manner of how those six men planned their trip to Syria: “like six friends trying to organize a fishing trip to Canada or a golf outing to Ireland.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stated that “he who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it.” I ask that in the future, Mr. Soucheray and the Pioneer Press turn away from passive acceptance and apathy regarding complex social ills and instead invest and offer your insight and influence to addressing real solutions for not just the challenging dilemma of the six men who now languish in jail but also the many other men and women who are considering following their example here in Minneapolis and around the world.
Tom Murray, Shoreview
(letter to the editor from a barking moonbat in the Pioneer Press today)...good old ‘white male privilege’ makes people terrorists!
Let’s just go back long ago, to where all these problems started: Wheel Maker Privilege! Check your privilege!