Understanding

 Suffering. That’s an easy subject to be stuck on in our time. I started reading God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question — Why We Suffer. By Bart D. Ehrman. Maybe the fifth or so of his books I’ve read. In beginning the discussion, he rightly asks, “How can we discuss suffering without first discussing the Holocaust?”

Then he describes a specific horror about that moment in history, a time in which some 11 million people were murdered because of their race, religion, politics, physical or mental conditions, and other myriad phenomena considered evil by the Nazi regime.

I may have read of this, and perhaps subjugated its primal horror to that secret place I hide things that threaten my sanity. At any rate, I’ve lost the ability to be surprised by the accounts of a nation’s actions. It seems that when the Nazi concentration camps encountered logjams in disposing of families considered unfit, they would bypass the normal execution process and begin throwing live children and babies into pits of fire while still alive, leaving the parents with the soothing anesthesia of gas or a bullet. Survivors testified at Nuremburg that a person could hear the screams of children all over the camps.

I stopped in my reading and considered the fact that I now have acquaintances whom I once considered decent and ordinary people who, from all accounts, would vote for Adolph Hitler risen from the grave if he would only promise to get rid of abortions, abortions for any reason under any circumstances and regulated only by the decision of a small group zealots who think America should be ruled in accordance with certain of the Hebrew religion’s ancient texts.

Am I the only one who sees the ironic symbiosis here? Am I the only one troubled by the act of a sitting president of the United States of America, a figure now worshipped by more than a third of our voting population—the titular head of a once noble political party—who has described the modern members of the Nazi regime as “some fine people?” Am I the only one who thinks we are staring into the abyss as a nation? Am I the only one who has decided to attempt an understanding ere they get done with the priority groups and come for me?

I’m embarking on a study of evil. I’ll keep you posted on the results of my journey.