"It is better to suffer evil than to cause it."
So says Aristotle and a legion of other great thinkers of the past. This is because losing your life isn't nearly as bad as losing your soul. In fact, many people can lose their lives in a heroic manner and gain more than they lost through dying.
If people remember you well, if your cause is forwarded due to your death, dying isn't even a bad thing. The worst thing that can happen is you suddenly cease to exist, through no fault of your own, and everyone pities you for a bit and then moves on. Your reputation and your memory is not tarnished. You die with your honor intact, and your loved ones are still in love with you.
But if you go about doing evil, it's because you've lost something important long before you die. You've lost the ability to distinguish good from evil, and therefore have lost the ability to enjoy anything good in this world. An evildoer can go for years, even decades, continuously being rotten and awful to everyone around him or her, never experiencing a single moment of genuine happiness in their lives, tortured and torturing in turn in an endless hell of the mind. Meanwhile dead people lie safely and serenely in their coffins feeling nothing, harming nobody. It is impossible to be an evildoer without having first cast out the light in your soul that acknowledges the true value of things. If you value things deeply, you would not go around harming them, whether they exist in your own life or in someone else's. The value of the thing is universal and applies equally everywhere. Anyone who still has a sense of the sacred in their hearts would not trample over love, truth, or beauty wherever it was found. Which means anyone harming someone else has already harmed themselves far more than they can ever hurt anyone else (unless, of course, they tempt them into the same dark path they themselves lead). A life without any sense of value, anything sacred, anything to care about at all, is worse than death. Odds are such a person won't be valued by anyone else either, unless they're extremely good liars, because this is a reciprocal world and you only get back what you put in to relationships with others.
Even if it isn't you, but someone you care about, who dies, you're still better off than the killer. Sure you will miss the person who died, but you can still remember fondly the love you shared, your memories don't just disappear, and the fact that they really happened, that your bond was true and absolute and unbroken, all the way to the grave, is an immeasurable recompense for the fact that it was severed too soon. Those who lose loved ones are sad at first, but eventually that will turn into a melancholy remembrance of the good times you shared, and the pain carves its way into kindness and gentle affection for the rest of mankind that still remains on this Earth that reminds you of the traits and values the dead person shared with them. Sakura Zensen is just one example of such a story.
Because of this, it is worse for two hundred million people to work together to murder one single innocent, than it is for one single evildoer to murder two hundred million people. In one case, a whole bunch of people have lost their souls, while in the other only one soul is lost, and all the others just lost their bodies, which were insignificant entities from the very beginning.
This is why politics is so important. If you knowingly sanction some evil act that your country is doing with its entire united power, then you are just as evil, just as soulless and monstrous, as if you were doing it yourself. For instance, if you think the torture chambers at Abu Ghraib were just dandy, you're no better than the people who were actually there doing the deeds.
It is a far worse tragedy for the world if the American people endorse and protect sadistic torturers, even if it only occurred to one or two people, than if a rogue group tortures billions of people but no one else defended or endorsed them. In one case an entire continent has lost its soul, whereas in the other nothing more than a little physical harm has been done.
Which is why it doesn't matter if, say, 98% of blacks die due to black on black shootings and only .001% are killed by police who are later let off by the justice system. This is because no one sanctioned the black on black shootings, it was just a rogue doing his own thing, and the justice system tried its best to catch and jail the perpetrator, even if it never did catch him. In the other case two hundred million people got together and said, "We're fine with this murder. We think murder is great. We want more murders. This person should be let free so he can go murder some more." The moral tragedy here is of a far greater scale than any serial killer who has ever lived. 200 million murders just happened inside people's souls, even if only one innocent black kid was shot in the entire country. Whenever people bring up black on black crime in reference to Black Lives Matter they sound so asinine. Nobody is disputing that blacks shooting other blacks is wrong, and when they do they go to jail, so what on Earth are they yapping about? There's no moral equivalence whatsoever. In one case the perps are arrested and go to jail. In the other case the policemen are forgiven and let go because murdering innocent black men isn't really a crime, it's a good thing, so why raise such a fuss? They don't face any penalty at all, not even condemnation from the people around them, for an act of utmost moral atrociousness.
Where Black Lives Matters goes wrong is the cases they're touting as evidence for such a moral atrocity. They aren't wrong in their moral calculus. One pardoned cop who is supported by the country as a whole is a larger moral atrocity than ten million blacks gunning each other down in gang wars. However, it isn't clear that any of the cops they talk about were actually guilty of any such crime, and the ones that do seem guilty of something tend to be prosecuted, so there's nothing left to complain about. Furthermore, there's a huge difference between a cop making a mistake and being forgiven for it, and a cop simply maliciously gunning down an innocent black man for no reason and being forgiven for it.
If a cop kills someone he thinks is holding a gun, but it turns out it was a cell phone, all you can do is shake your head and sigh. It's no different from when a surgeon thinks he's curing you but his hand slips and you bleed to death instead. Or a doctor thinks you have disease A, misdiagnoses you, and you die while getting zero effective treatment even though you could have been saved. Mistakes are made. Policing is a touch and go, spur of the moment, life and death world. There's friendly fire in war zones as well, and no one thinks we should be prosecuting the poor soldiers who end up killing their own.
What I have seen, out of all the cases so far presented by the liberal press and the Black Lives Matters movement, is cops who did their job perfectly and have nothing to be ashamed of, or cops that made an innocent mistake and didn't mean any harm. At most you could fire sad cops for malpractice or sue their commanders for not training them well enough. You could never say that America as a whole is just murdering blacks for the fun of it. Not on the evidence shown in the cases cited. Not even a single time, in a single local community, has any such heinous crime been done. It's just in the paranoid heads of black racists who libel all whites as Nazis that any such 'free-fire-zone' for cops or vigilantes exist. America is not Auschwitz. But if they were right and the evidence for their claims was true, then they would have a reason to be rioting all over the country, because if that many people are endorsing murder in their hearts, it's a sickness and a defilement far worse than any amount of lone losers taking potshots at each other.
It doesn't matter if, say, the number of victims of 'crime x' is less than the number of people who die by lightning. What matters is the number of people who endorse 'crime x.' Who give the doer of the deed a free pass, and let them back out onto the street with a pat on the back. I would be more ashamed of a country that lets killers go and looks the other way when they catch one red handed than by a country with 999 per 1,000 murder rate per year, because at least in the latter country there still remains 1 decent soul alive. This is why blacks who defended O.J. Simpson and cheered for his acquittal are all scum of the lowest order, murderers in their hearts, twisted mannequins not befitting of the term human being, and should be rounded up and gassed at the earliest possible moment whites reassert themselves and get back into power. There is no excuse for what they did, and what they stood for, on that day. That was the moment black America lost its soul.
Blacks accuse us of endorsing the murder of innocents, but they actually did it right in front of us, clear as day, and are still laughing and joking about what a great moment it was to this day. They are the ones with blood on their hands, not us. And it is with them that there must ultimately be a reckoning, not us.
This isn't about black lives matter or O.J. Simpson, though. This is about the shooting in Oregon.
I don't know the name of the Oregon shooter or his ideology. No doubt he's just another crazy guy venting his rage with the world. What I do know is that there were around 200 million co-conspirators in this murder spree. Every single person who refuses to let gun control pass in America is responsible for this man having the weapons he needed to kill his targets. It isn't just one soul that was lost today, but all 200 million voters who refuse to abolish the 2nd Amendment and remove guns from these crazies so they can't kill any further innocents.
The blood is on the gun crowd's hands. They refuse to let us disarm the spree killers, and so more and more spree killings happen, every week, every hour of the day. The killing just goes on and on. Killing that didn't have to happen. Killings that were empowered by others, others who never have to repent or say they're sorry, no matter how many innocent corpses pile up in front of their eyes. These people are still respected and saluted like they're good, decent people every day, even though they've directly caused the deaths of scores of kindergartners. Nowhere else on Earth are spree killings this common, and even if they do happen, even if they do happen with a gun, at least the people on the rest of the planet can say to themselves: 'we did everything possible to prevent this tragedy, so at least we aren't to blame for it.' But when 200 million people are working fervently every day to make sure that the crazies in their midst can have three handguns and a semiautomatic rifle for whenever they want to go on a spree killing and splash their name in the papers, they can't excuse themselves with that line. They are in on it. They are co-conspirators. They should be right there alongside the mass murderer standing trial. I can't see any difference between one and the other. They endorsed gun ownership, knowing that this would be the result. Having seen the pattern over and over and over again, they shrugged and said they were fine with it, it didn't matter to them one bit, no matter how many innocents die, they're going to defend the right to bear arms to the very last. They are just as bad as the people who cheered O.J. Simpson's acquittal. They keep acquitting guns, over and over, no matter how guilty they are. What sick satisfaction do they take in keeping guns free for all when this is the only result gun ownership has ever had in America, every day, day after day, year after year, atrocity after atrocity after atrocity?
Only an evil person who has lost his soul can shrug off the consequences of his own actions that keep guns in the hands of crazed spree killers. Only people without consciences can avoid the obvious guilt they share with the shooter for letting the shooter shoot. The ridiculous excuse gun advocates give, that if everyone in the country were armed the shooter would die more quickly in the ensuing firefight so the casualties would be lower, is just as lame as the current situation.
So what if spree killers could be reduced to killing only two or three people instead of ten or twenty through ubiquitous gun ownership? That's still two or three dead people who wouldn't have had to die at all if the killer hadn't had access to a gun. You're changing the numerical calculus around a bit but you're not changing the moral calculus whatsoever. The number of bodies went down, but the number of lost souls stays the exact same -- all the people who empowered that crazed gunman are still empowering him just like before, nothing has changed in the least, the same number of souls are lost either way. Since the spree killer always gets the advantage of surprise and always gets to shoot first before anyone else even knows they should be firing back, there's no way you can avoid the initial tragedy of the initial gun ambush. Innocents will die no matter how many vigilante heroes come in to the rescue afterward. The murder is still done and it's still too late to undo it no matter how many well trained law abiding crack shots you have at hand to limit the damage any further. If the killer hadn't had any gun to start with at all, though, you could have kept the damage to nothing at all. Even if the guy were crazy enough to dive at someone with a knife, odds are the innocent bystander will live. After all this is in the middle of campus and there are dozens of nearby people who can wrestle the perpetrator down and administer first aid to the victim. Only guns are lethal immediately. Victims of any other type of assault will probably live. If only the guns were stopped, the spree killings would end the very next day.
The latest shooting is just one more brick in the solid wall of evidence showing that America needs gun control. It doesn't matter how rarely or how few people die to spree killings, what matters is how many share the guilt of these preventable tragedies and the moral massacre of hundreds of millions of people endorsing this type of crime and letting it happen with a free pass. It's like if Black Lives Matters were real and what they were describing was true. It's the same level of moral massacre. It's the same level of the entire country clearly losing its soul and its honor and its very right to exist. We are monsters for letting these guns stay on the loose. We are monsters for empowering monsters to be monsters and then looking the other way when little kindergartners are eaten like so many chicken nuggets by our very own raised and nurtured pets. This is America's policy decision, and therefore this is America's sin, this is America's crime. It has nothing to do with the nameless Oregon shooter, and everything to do with the rest of us who let it happen when we had the power to stop it at any time, just like every other nation on Earth has stopped it by banning guns long ago.
Of course, it isn't the fault of anyone who recommends gun control. We aren't to blame. The people to blame are the ones who won't let these sensible policy changes on the ballot. I hope they're proud of themselves. Seven more people dead who didn't have to die. Must be fun.
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