The evil men do

Rioting students overturning a news van.

There is nothing particularly unusual in that - we've seen it before many times.

What makes this a little unusual is the reason for the riot, the sacking of a beloved football coach. The reason why the coach was sacked?

He was informed of an assistant coach sodomizing a 10 year old boy in the showers and did nothing!

Yesterday Ele posted at HomePaddock about asset sales. I left a comment

Governments shouldn’t be engaged in commercial enterprise anyway – its not their brief.

People are essentially corrupt, a fact we have to live with because it’s not about to change anytime soon but to limit the damage this causes is to dilute and spread power as widely as possible.

Ele, who has a lovely soul and who sees people as essentially good, as I do to, took exception, perhaps to my use of corruption - you can read the thread.

I quickly realized, of course, that were engaged in a misunderstanding of semantics. For me "corruption" means the sickness of sin which all people are subject too.

And this means in part that we can be blinded by our own self interest or the interests of others close to us. And when confronted with a choice between good and evil we have the capacity to lie, even to ourselves that the action we are taking is for the greater good. This is the lifelong struggle we all face, no matter how essentially good we are.

The people caught up in this maelstrom at Penn State, apart from the sodomizer himself are in Ele's words "the better people"" highly respected, accomplished and honoured - as of course was the sodomizer. And yet they slipped up badly, really badly. And in the cold light of day we wonder why.

But there is great evil in the world and we do close our eyes to it or even participate because we are caught up in events beyond our control and we want to survive and prosper, if we can.

That is why a civilized people, the Germans, were able to close their eyes to the Holocaust which is what most of them did.