I awoke this morning thinking about evil. Not the best way to start a day, but a reasonable choice considering where I am.
Let me explain.
There’s a small town tucked away in relatively unpopulated part of a state that will remain nameless. I visit frequently. It’s not exactly picturesque, but it has a certain charm that comes from a mashup of college students, redneck hillbillies, and commerce. An uneasy mix in the best of times, but one that’s endured for a century. More than endured—the close proximity of different cultures and life goals generate a vitality greater than that found in many larger cities. A great place to go to school, raise kids, or settle down in retirement.
Or so everyone thought.
The evil started small, popping up here and there over a long period of time, at least in comparison to what would come. A hiker is murdered on the Appalachian Trail; a couple found slain in a local park; coeds disappear, never to be seen again.
Any one of these is enough to unnerve a small community. Add them together and they change the ambience of place. Not all at one time, but in a creep so slow even long-time residents can’t pinpoint what has changed. As an outsider, and one raised in the city, there’s no mystery to me. It’s the waiting for the next horror and the near certainty it will come, sooner or later.
Then it does. A troubled student gets a gun, one designed to kill scores in a very short period of time. He brags about it on social media. Post his greviences. Fantasizes about revenge. Does everything but go to the local police station and beg to be arrested.
On that day it only takes a few minutes to kill more than thirty people, most of them young college students. Each had worries upon waking that morning. Assignments due, exams on the horizon, troubles in relationships, sick loved ones. Important concerns that kept them up at night and furrowed their brows during the day. They meant nothing in the end.
Years have past, and with them more mass killings. Not here, in this small mountain town, but in other places both similar and different. The deaths memorialized on the school’s parade ground have doubled, tripled, quadrupled and more across the country since that fateful day. The evil that lived in a sick mind spread, like a matasticizing cancer, to other communities. There is no cure in sight.
But on this late summer morning, with a bright sun burning heavy dew off the grass, I wonder if evil still resides in this place. Watching, waiting, planning for a time when it can rise again to create chaos, pain, and mourning.
And yet, life goes on. Not as if nothing happened, for those that died are remembered, if only in passing. But the days are filled with cares of the living.
Until it is all taken away by an evil famous for its patience.
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