When is a Good Time to Acknowledge the Nature of Evil?
This morning my youngest son witnessed his first killing — a man with a knife slitting the throat of a white ram. He wasn’t expecting to hear the muffled bleat of the poor animal or the gurgling sound the blood made as it went back into its windpipe. He wasn’t expecting to see so much blood, spurting out like a fount, flowing down the tar like a black-red stream and staining the ram’s white fur as it struggled.
“That is so mean.” The frightened little boy said. “Why will that man kill the goat? He is so evil.”
I sighed.
At first I wanted to tell him that all the meat he ate came from this continuous sacrifice of beasts for man’s pleasure, I also wanted to remind him of the story of Abraham and Isaac we had read in the bible but just before the words came out, something deeper nudged at the edge of my consciousness. A question — a rather unusual question.
“At what point does a parent open a child’s eyes to the nature of evil in a purportedly good world?”
My boy’s consternation at the gruesome nature of the ram’s ‘murder’ was a byproduct of the cocoon that I and the mainstream media he was exposed to, had wound around him. The endless visuals of talking animals on TV that had fancy names, exhibited human behaviour and never had to die coupled with my…
