Evil Inside vs. Evil Outside

"Evil" is such an interesting word, when used it tends to evoke strong emotions or reactions in people. I'm guessing part of the reason is because it sounds so extreme, so final, so...well, evil. If you checkout the definition of the word it's pretty interesting and really would seem that a lot of different things could be considered evil by a lot of different people. Does that make "evil" relative? Oh man, well enough of this, though it's definitely something to think about but not even what I want to talk about.

Remember just over 7yrs ago when a group of men used 4 planes as weapons and thousands of innocent people died and remember how the word "evil" was associated with that act? The response of our country was profound. We were united against a common foe, an evil from outside our borders that was attempting to instill fear into our hearts but we would not have it. We stood together and we stood tall, and though some have strong feelings about our current stand today, we continue, especially our dedicated men and women who serve in the military.

Fast forward to now. Our country (and arguably the world) finds itself facing another crisis as a result of what some could consider evil but the difference this time is that this evil is coming from inside. Through the greed of our very own banks, lenders, financial institutions and a lack of leadership from our government (both parties are at fault and I would hope we could all agree on that) we have actually created this crisis ourselves, the evil is coming from the inside.

Notice the different reactions in the face of these two evils. One united us as a country by allowing us to point our national finger at an evil from the outside; where we saw people do extraordinary things for other people and where heroes who sacrificed everything were made. The current evil is breaking us apart, making the divide between those that have and those that don't have as much wider than it ever has been before. Our national mood swing of "I'm going to get mine" to "I'm going to protect mine" is causing us to do extraordinary things to other people. It's as though we'd rather cut our hand off then point the finger at ourselves but maybe that's just the loss of blood talking.