On the Fading of Outrage and the Inevitability of Atrocity

Eventually, things will change. The outrages of today, the assaults on human dignity, the atrocities, and the crimes against humanity will pass into the pages of history, and reading of them will become an academic exercise. Already, for people today, learning of the holocaust doesn’t bring the bite, the pile driver jab to the stomach that it ought to. The machinations of Nazi Germany’s effort to exterminate, to engage in the whole sale bureaucratic slaughter of millions of people deemed unworthy for life, don’t inspire the horror in people that it should. That anything could ever transpire on such a scale, that the human species is capable of that should be terrifying, it’s something that should never lose its power. No matter how much time passes, the fact of the holocaust should always be able to move people to tears, to nausea. Nothing going on today rivals that crime, but there are many crimes today that, while not meeting those epic proportions, are still shockingly brutal, horrific, and, for lack of a better word, evil. What word, if not “evil”, should be used to describe the act of half a dozen men pinning a bound and blind folded man to the ground, while one of them saws through his neck with a knife like someone carving up a Christmas roast or a Thanksgiving turkey? What word, if not “evil”, can describe the maneuvering, conniving, and scheming of people to invade a country, placing hundreds of thousands of their fellow country men at risk, and killing thousands of entirely innocent people in the most brutal ways possible, for reasons not entirely clear and motives not entirely pure? If doing that while knowing that it would destroy lives, families, and futures, unleash a torrent of atrocities, torture, massacres, and countless other misdeed, if doing all of that is not evil, what is? How might something like that not be evil, but two men who love each other getting married is? All of the evil acts of today will fade with time. Eventually, they will lose their power to inspire the raw, unfiltered emotions that they do, in all but a small number of people. They will be replaced with the crimes of their own time, the only thing we can do is try to make sure that the inevitable future atrocities aren’t as barbaric as today’s and those of day’s past. The best we can hope for is to make it impossible, or at the very least harder for tomorrow’s Saddams, Bush’s, Hitlers, Stalins, Nixon’s, and Pinochets to do what they do best. If we are able to ensure that tomorrow's crimes don't exceed or even equal those of today, and those that belong to history, that would be the most success we might realistically hope for.