Darth Bunny

Last night I finished a Star Wars novel (Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader).  OK, I can hear the groans through my monitor.  It is cheap pulp Sci-FI, but I can sometimes pull meaning out of a Huggies commercial, so go figure.

I am fascinated by the character of Darth Vader. 

When I was a kid, I thought Darth Vader was pretty much the scariest dude ever conceived.  Rotten to the core, he deserved to be hated.  However as more of the story comes out, it is clear that Darth Vader is a sad tragic villain who made a couple of really bad choices. 

That is what I find fascinating: I think everyone has the seeds of evil in their life.  In the context of the book that I have just read, evil is having a goal that so consumes a person to the extent that anything done to achieve that goal is moral in the eyes of the individual.  The faulty logic being that anything done to bring about a moral goal is in and of itself moral.

The goal itself may be laudable or even objectively good, but pursued to the extreme it becomes evil.  In the book I was reading the emperor and Darth Vader had very simple goals.  The emperor wanted to bring peace and stability to an often chaotic and bureaucratic government.  Vader wanted to save his wife at all costs.  Both goals are noble, but both characters were undone in their pursuit of their goals.

We can easily look at the world today and see examples of the same kind of flawed logic.  I think everyone can universally agree that terrorism is a bad thing.  But some of the tactics we as a people have embraced to end terrorism come very close to a dangerous line, a line that I think has been crossed on occasion.  But that is not where I want to conclude.

What scares me is how easily I(me, Ben) can be ruthless and by definition evil.  As I have mentioned in the past, my son struggles with medical issues.  Wanting to get him the best care available is a primary goal in my life.  Now I think that is an excellent goal.  But the tactics I have used to achieve that goal have resulted in some rather ugly behavior.  It scares me how often I have crossed the line. 

Now before you say, “oh, it was just stress”, let me give a little peak.  I was arguing with my insurance company that was previously located in the World Trade Center.  To the best of my recollection the words out of my mouth were, “I hope the next plane gets you.”

If that was the only time in my life that I had crossed the line, I would feel a little better.  But it is just one mild example.  I have been lucky.  My actions have not resulted in any serious damage (to my knowledge).

All of that to say, I do not think there are many people who are corrupt to the core.  But I think that in the pursuit of good, we all have the potential to become monsters.