Sad, brooding theme that's been arising for me these days: all kinds of people I love going through painful changes, sometimes seeming to be pounded mercilessly by hurricane-strength tides ... So I thought, Hey! I'll do a problem of evil post. Because that's what everyone wants as part of their TGIF pre-weekend festivities.
I don't much buy 'the problem of evil', though. Why do the innocent suffer? Um, why does anyone suffer? Who's innocent? I have long been offended by the notion of 'innocence,' which seems to imply that anyone who has erred is beyond the reach of compassion--or at least has to stand in line behind the more worthy. In nineteenth century England the discourse of philanthropy was fixated on the deserving poor--and the concurrent implication was that the undeserving could safely be excluded from consideration. And this notion remained intact in the demonization of the Welfare Queen effigy who was immolated in the anti-welfare policies initiated in the US in the nineties ... wait--is this that kind of blog? Not usually. You get the idea, I think. I used to write that way all the time. That was in graduate school. It's like riding a bicycle: a pain in the ass, until you get used to it. Or possibly, even after ...
Back to the problem of evil. It's hard to watch people you love suffer--it should be hard to watch anyone suffer, and I suppose it is; but those close to you--those are the people that you really think you can help. And I was feeling very powerless. Sometimes, I can't help because someone is so deep in darkness that my love or my words can't compete with the vividness of whatever nightmare of unhappiness is captivating them; a variation on the theme is when a friend is least capable of accepting help when it's needed most.
By the time I got round to writing this, I was seeing some movement in a less painful direction, and that's always cause for gratitude. As for myself: I've been doing well, thank you. Bouncing up and down a little, but steadily, incrementally on in some direction ... I don't know, my beloved readers, I really don't. Can you imagine me as a tightrope walker? What does it feel like to fall into the net?