“One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.” — Joseph Stalin
People use the word
evil glibly and a lot –-
this person is evil;
mass murderers are
evil; somebody’s sister-
in-law is evil; all religions
other than mine are evil;
the proverbial mother-in-
law is evil; of course, Dick
Cheney is evil, but when
I think of so very scary, skin-
crawling, stop-you-in-your-
steps evil, I remember the
story of the perfect, older son
who shot himself, accident-
ally they said but not really
accidentally, with the shotgun
his parents had given him as a
birthday present. On the very
imperfect surviving younger
son’s birthday following the
dubious death of his perfect
older brother, the younger
son’s grief-stricken parents
presented him with the gift
of his perfect older brother’s
shotgun.
bobdahl 
Thanks for the reminder of this chilling story … evil, indeed.
As you suggest, evil is in the perception. For myself, there is a huge leap between evil, the gift of a shotgun, suicide, re-gifting the shotgun and then a return jump to evil [especially to Dick Cheney evil].
Hey, Jess, if you do not like skipping to Dick Cheney as evil, try obscene. Try 5,000 American soldiers and a million Iraqis and Afghanis dead = obscene = George Bush. Or, if you are my age, try 58,000 American soldiers and many millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodes and Mhong dead = obscene = JFK/LBJ/RMN. Oh, hell, make it simple: WAR = OBSCENE.
Berbiglia, Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. Still, I maintain that drawing a parallel between gifting/re-gifting a shotgun and “Dick Cheney evil” is a tremendous leap.
Jess: sorry I was a little harsh there! I saw in the Cheney and shotgun parallel that neither the parents nor Cheney seemed to realize their internal Evil that caused them to continue their obscene behavior.