How Much is Too Much??

Jim was watching a movie last night that I found very disturbing. I forget the title at the moment, but the premise is that a terrorist has planted three nuclear bombs at various American cities and set them to go off simultaneously. The terrorist is arrested, and the FBI attempts to inteerrogate him, to find out where the bombs are hidden. The terrorist is an ex American military, so their methods of interrogation had no affect on him. So they brought in an interrogation specialist, who resorte.d to various methods of torture, which included but were certainly not limited to cutting off fingers, and injuring various parts of his body. At one point it looked to me like he was on the verge of death. Jim and I got into a serious argument, because as ex military, he felt that any method of torture was , justified, to prevent the potential deaths of millions of citizens. I countered as I learned from moral theology, that one can never use an evil means to acheive a good end. To me, it would be no different than bombing an abortion clinic. You may force it to close down, but what if one of the workers there dies in the blast?? What would that say to a world which expects Christians to be peacekeepers? Aside from which, if you open the door to toture, where does it stop? You could have the Nazis all over again!

Power of the message

In this last year I have had a couple of examples of how powerful the spoken word can be, and how what we say can be used to either promote good or evil. About six months ago my husband Jim and I went to see a Christian artist by the name of Toby Mac at the Spokane Arena. About halfway through the concert, I stopped listening to the music, and found myself watching the reactions of the audience. Even though there were easily a few thousand young people present, there were times during the concert when it was so quiet that you could hear a pin drop. I remember saying to my husband afterwards that I had the eerie feeling that these kids would have followed Mr. Mac out into the streets, or done anything else he asked them to do. At one point I don't think it would have mattered to them if his message had been positive or negative, because there is a point at which music reaches past our minds right into our hearts. Especially young people are so impressionable and vulnerable. That's why it's so so important to guard our words, to never say anything that will put them down, or stir up hate, but to make them aware that they are rare and precious souls, irreplaceable and unrepeatable. The other example was shown to me this past week. A high school history teacher was teaching his class about the Nazi movement. One of the students ask howthe German people could have stood by and let the evil happen. So the teacher decided to try an experiment. He set up a society for just his class called "The Wave". The mottos were very simple. "Strength Through Discipline" and "Strength Through Community."The kids were to actively recruit new members. At first the results were positive. The kids were getting better grades, more respectful, and kids who wre outcasts began to feel like they belonged. But soon kids were spying on each other, gettin,experiment, his class was studying the Nazis, and he wanted to show how easily people can be brainwashed. Eventually,the kids were getting into fights, and spying on one another, and those who dared to speak out were threatned and beat up. It was frightening how quickly the teacher was able to make the kids conform to what he wanted, and how quickly the movement caught on. In fact, there is one young man who begs to become the teacher's bodyguard. The ironic thing is In the movie, he is eventually able to reign them in, but the part that is not shown is that this teacher, the school principal,, and the school superintendant all lost their jobs, and the teacher ended up getting a divorce. The ironic thing isAlso, many of the kids needed psychological counseling. It just shows again how po0werful a message can be, and how careful we must be, especially if we are in authority. But the message can also be conveyed with very few or even no words. We had a Corpus Christi procession after Mass today. i have no doubt that OurLord in the Eucharist passing by touched people.