100 Days

Is humanity inherently evil?  That is a loaded question for sure, but something I thought about today when I saw a blog post about the 100 day anniversary of the abduction of the school girls from Chibok, Borno State, Nigeria.  Their cause has been blunted by the news cycle and the attention span of a public that sees a new tragedy daily.  I shudder to think of what these girls have gone through, and still face, and it  leaves me wanting to either scream or take all my girls up in a big hug then lock them in a room.  Why do we do things like this to each other?  Why can’t we respect individual differences, may they be in race, religion, sex, or ideals?

That is one of the problems of course.  The people who abducted those girls do not see themselves as monsters.  They have a way of justifying what they have done.  I will not speculate motive, other than the obvious of wanting the girls under their control, but whatever the motivation they see at as doing “right” on some level.  Because of this, why do I have the right to condemn them for following their differences in ideals?  The answer I hope is obvious.  They are imposing their ideals in such a way that it takes away other’s rights to the same.

This is especially true when it comes to kids.  These girls have done nothing wrong.  They wanted an education and a chance to make something of their journey through this world.  They ended up being easy targets.  We as a world community are accessories to the crime.  We will send troops in for regime change and to restore governments, but why not for restoring humanity?  The group holding the girls have a “justification”, but do we for our lack or response?  Maybe there are teams on the ground that I do not know about, looking for the girls.  Maybe one day soon we will find out about the heroes that went quietly about their job while the world cried out why nothing more is being done.  I can only pray for that.

Going back to my original question, are we inherently evil?  I would like to answer we are not.  I would like to say that the evilness is just seeing the world through distorted lenses, and that maybe the “bad people” can wake up one day and find their humane compassion restored.  Days like today, though, I find it hard.  Instead of doing something about the missing girls, we will to them slowly decay into history.  The additional tragedy of this situation is that I am sure that if we had used ten percent of the intelligence used to stomp out terrorism on this problem, we could have accomplished something meaningful, like the restoration of the young ladies’ freedom.  That would have struck a blow against evil and showed our true humanity.