What did you say?

Do you believe in pure good and pure evil? This is the question Jeff was trying to answer tonight for his homework assignment in his Genocide Studies course. He does, I don’t. We ended up discussing it long after the paper was submitted. I love that I am married to someone who enjoys blaviating with me for hours.

To sum up, Jeff believes that some actions are so heinous that they cross a line into being pure evil. Conversely some actions are so great that they cross a line into being pure good.

I can’t wrap my mind around it but to me that definition is too simple. I believe that everyone is capable good and everyone is capable of evil. The conditions that cause people to act outside of what we consider normal are around us everyday and to say only monsters act that way is to ignore and not fully consider other factors which could and do lead to acts of evil. Everyone now agrees that the holocaust was pure evil, but not at the time it was happening. Many otherwise good people turned looked away. There are things happening in our world today, things we turn our backs to because they are complicated and we don’t really know what to do about it, and those things we don’t think of as pure evil like the holocaust. Things like Katrina and poverty. Or when we go to war, what are our reasons? What were the reasons people commit genocide? Are those reasons and are those things the same or different? I think calling some people pure evil and then trusting others because, hey I know they are good people and not pure evil is the easy way, the 6 o’clock news way of looking at the world. Just tell me are they one of us or one of them, so I know weather or not I am going to take the time to care.

I am rambling, probably because I threw out my back and I have been in so much pain!

If you are still reading I have a funny antidote for a reward. One of the guys who works with my husband, his job is to administer hearing tests to people whose job it is to be near really noisy stuff. He tells me that he has noticed that married men cannot hear sounds at a very small range of frequencies, out of one of their ears. When he was working in the US this was the right ear, but now in Japan it is the left ear. This is not defined as hearing loss just curious. After giving this much thought this soon to be married guy has decided that married men aquire the ability to tune out any sound that is within the same frequency range as their wives voice. Only in the ear that is next to their wives while driving a car. Because you see we drive on the other side of the road here in Japan. Ha, ha. That must be why Jeff is able to listen to me discuss his homework long after he has submitted his paper.