The struggle between good and evil is as old as humanity itself. It is a battle that has been waged every minute of every day and even today humanity demonstrates daily that it is a fight we will never finish and will never win.
In the 1981 movie Excalibur, Merlin the magician said: “Good and evil. There never is one without the other.”
Sadly, that is proven every day. It’s why our jails are full, why we have to lock our doors and windows. On the flip side, happily it is proven every day that where evil goes, goodness is not far behind.
Who knows what evil lurks in the heart and the mind of those cowardly people who, in the early morning hours of Dec. 30, decided they wanted to vandalize two homes in Slave Lake that were being rebuilt after the disastrous fire that destroyed much of the town last May.
The idiots smashed windows, kicked in doors and destroyed newly-installed drywall. They must have made their parents very proud.
As if the people of Slave Lake hadn’t suffered enough, along come some stupid idiots who think it would be fun to damage the house of someone struggling to rebuild after their house was burned down.
It’s another reminder of how brainless people can be, how evil lurks inside the soul and too often finds its way out. Vandalism is often just bored kids trying to get into trouble so they’ll be noticed. But to do this damage to people whose lives were already severely damaged, is inexcusable.
It was General Corman in Apocalypse Now, who said: “There’s a conflict in every human heart, between the rational and irrational, between good and evil. And good does not always triumph. Sometimes the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called ‘the better angels of our nature.’”
It is obvious that in the case of those Slave Lake vandals, the dark side won on that night.
Fortunately, the good that resides deep inside each person can also find its way out.
The Gazette recently received a letter from Bert and Barb LaBuick describing their wonderful surprise of Christmas Eve, when five young ladies knocked on their door and when Bert answered, they sang Christmas carols.
Why did they do it? The five just decided it was something they would do ... something that no doubt brightened the LaBuicks’ evening and demonstrated that for every idiot out there with a dark heart there is a counterbalance, someone with the goodness in their heart.
Thankfully, the goodness comes out more often than not and in this case proves again that once we get past that small minority of troublemakers and disenfranchised youths, there are generations, young and old, who will ensure the world, and our own little community, remains in good hands.
It’s always good to remember the words of Davy Crockett, in The Alamo in 1960, who said: “There’s right and there’s wrong. You got to do one or the other. You do the one and you’re living. You do the other and you may be walking around, but you’re as a dead as a beaver hat.”
