Evil: What's In a Word?

After Friday night and the "Dark Knight Rises" massacre at a theatre in Aurora, CO, America is in a deep collective search for a motive that would cause James Holmes to shoot 70+ people before turning himself in to police outside of the screening. But, as is usually the case, the conversation is never elevated to a point where we can investigate societal, political, or idealogical factors that would turn a quiet college student into a mass-murderer. Instead, we label the perpetrator as "crazy", "maniacal", or "evil"; and we allow ourselves to avoid confronting the true reason that Holmes opened fire in a theater of innocent moviegoers.

Of course, this psychological deception is par for the course here in America. The most obvious example of this is the September 11th attack, where (if the official story is to be believed) radical Islamic terrorists hijacked planes and crashed them into designated targets, killing almost 4,000. The attack was quickly labeled as an "act of evil" and less than 2 months later...we had boots in the ground in Afghanistan to find and destroy Al-Qaeda cells. It's unfortunate that we weren't able to turn these tragic circumstances into an analytical study of why these terrorists wanted to commit such heinous violence and use this information to promote a more harmonious world. It wouldn't have been very hard, either. The easiest element of the attack to deconstruct would be the targets themselves. The Pentagon is a universal symbol of war, and commands that have been issued from here have affected the majority of the world's population. The World Trade Center is an international financial hub and represents both the good and the bad of our global monetary system. Knowing these basic facts about the targets, we're prepared to investigate the true motive of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda and come to a greater understanding of their grievances against the US. This, by no means, exonerates the crime. Nor does it mean that the attacks were in the slightest bit valid. It does, however, paint a picture of the world we're actually living in, and exposes the foundation of international resentment of America.