Story originally printed in the La Crosse Tribune or online at www.lacrossetribune.com

Published - Friday, September 05, 2008

Joe Orso: Where does judgment end and compassion begin when we see evil?

By JOE ORSO / La Crosse Tribune

It’s easy to see how biblical storytellers knew rainbows as a sign of the covenant between God and Earth.

“Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds,” God says in Genesis 9, “I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind.”

Seeing rainbows, like seeing a sky full of stars, gives us an experience of the world as good.

But what about torture?

And how are we to contemplate a child used for prostitution, or a little boy, like the one in the photograph on my desk, cradling a machine gun?

And nuclear bombs? Are those some kind of sign from us that we are no longer interested in the covenant? Can we call the bombs evil?

Eric Warner, an adjunct instructor of ethics at Western Technical College, said evil isn’t a very popular idea these days.

“One of the things that concerns me about young people is they’ve been really well taught in the idea of not judging others, but they have a very hard time knowing what they believe in,” said Warner, 40, who works as a lawyer in Winona, Minn. “If you don’t believe in a standard of evil, it’s hard to take a stand on anything.”

Without the belief that slavery is evil or segregation wrong, Warner said, these never would have come to an end.

People think more in terms of right and wrong than they're willing to admit, he said.

But if you’re going to say evil is in the world, where do you place it?

On his opening night of class this week, Warner discussed his past drug use and used the same story in our phone conversation to explain how selfishness is at the core of evil.

“If everybody was like me at that time, there wouldn’t be any Mother Teresas,” he said.

But was the pile of white powder evil? Was his body that would receive it evil? Was it the movement of Warner’s hand as he reached for the drug?

We all know experiences of pain and believe some things are wrong. But can anyone say, in a particular way, what is evil? Can we point to it?

I can grasp evil best when talking about systems — a country that uses torture, a corporation that fosters death, a system where a child finds a gun in his hands.

But while the people at the top of those systems challenge me in this, I have a hard time placing evil in people. As individuals, we seem too fragile for anything so monstrous.

And I have never heard anyone describe himself or herself as evil, which tells me most of us struggle with placing evil in people.

Rather, people suffer. People are in pain. People cause pain.

And because I suffer, too, seeing others as fellow sufferers draws out my compassion, which tempers my judgment.

Joe Orso works part time for the La Crosse Tribune and the Franciscan Spirituality Center. Opinions in this column

are his own.