The othering of evil

I watched The Pianist the other day. It's a beautifully made film and I like Adrien Brody.

But it's a film made by a man who plead guilty to raping a 13 year old girl.

I love James Brown. Get on Up is a song that is sure to get me dancing around the house. But he was certainly a wife beater and very likely a rapist.

Thomas Jefferson is my favorite of the founding fathers. I believe that his idea of spilling blood every so often is the only way to counter-act Michel's rule of oligarchy. But Jefferson was a racist and a rapist.

There are more examples from Bill Clinton and Obama and Roosevelt to Helen Mirren and even (sometimes) Joss Whedon, examples of people who I do (or could) respect except that they have serious issues with racism or classism or sexism or a combination of all that plus some violence and abuse thrown in.

(And I haven't even thrown in the people I do dislike- like Schwarzenegger or Clarence Thomas).

We do this thing where we take things that are horrible like rape or murder or violence or hate and we call them evil. We use that word, evil, so that we don't have to do the hard work of looking into ourselves to see if we might share some of the same things that cause that kind of awfulness. A rapist is a creepy man in a dark alley, not a founding father or a man who makes art. A racist is a beer-bellied red neck in a southern state, not your kid's guidance counselor.

When we push away the awful things, when we shove them into a closet or box them into a stereotype of what we think evil is, then we give it a way to flourish in ourselves. We don't have to examine it too closely. We don't have to hold ourselves accountable. We "other" evil things, so we can continue liking and respecting things and people and even ourselves.

But we have to do the hard work. We have to admit we are the source of the hatred and the violence, either in our own hearts or when we refuse to acknowledge it in people we like or love. The only way to fix "evil" is to own it.