OBSCENITY

We keep the lights on, the TV or radio always playing, for we sense and fear it.

The old gods are coming back ... if ever they left ... which, of course, they did not.

But their voices are growing stronger:

Hate calls to hate, blood calls for more blood, and the world is blind though all claim both their eyes can see.

Blood, lust, intolerance plot in desert village, in cosmopolitan apartment ... aided by the latest in the science of death.

Evil is no faceless stranger, living in a distant neighborhood.

Evil has a wholesome, hometown face, with merry eyes and an open smile. Evil walks among us, wearing a mask which looks like all our faces.

Yes, we keep the lights on.  But how do we keep the lights on inside ourselves?

The Darkness in us climbs closer to possession of our minds during the night, for the moon sings to it,

and the endless depths between the stars speaks its language.

To that shadowy self, evil looks lovely in too little light, and it murmurs, "Why not? You know you want to."

We yearn for tomorrow and the progress that it represents.

But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was the progress in it?

Or we yearn for yesterday, for what was or what might have been.

But as we are yearning, the present is becoming the past, so the past is nothing but our yearning for second chances.

There will be no second chances for Malala Yousafzai.

In a place of hate and intolerance, the 14 year old girl spoke out for the rights of all living to achieve all they can, to become all they are able to become.

On Tuesday, masked Taliban gunmen answered Ms. Yousafzai’s courage with bullets,

singling out the 14-year-old on a bus filled with terrified schoolchildren, then shooting her in the head and neck.

A Taliban spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, confirmed by phone that Ms. Yousafzai had been the target, calling her crusade for education rights an “obscenity.”
      

“She has become a symbol of Western culture in the area; she was openly propagating it,” Mr. Ehsan said,

 

adding that if she survived, the militants would certainly try to kill her again. “Let this be a lesson.”

 

A lesson?

 

Hitler taught us that lesson decades ago.  Tyrants from Cain to now repeat it over and over and over.

 

What lesson did Malala teach us with her life?

 

Evil is ever present. But love is ever-present too. Courage finds voice in the frailest of vessels. Faith sings it song most hauntingly in the darkest night.

 

The human spirit is indominable, and the human heart outlasts - and can defeat - even the most self-defeating force of all, which is hate.