the age of simplicity

An observation: Evil follows a bell curve with age.

When we first become aware of evil, it's pretty simple: That bad kid took my toy. Maturity forces us to confront more evils: teachers scold, bands sell out, lovers betray, politicians lie, nations oppress, mechanics smirk, hospitals gouge, tax assessors scheme, termites eat.

But it appears that older people start to see things in simpler terms again, and evils fall into a distinct pecking order. Eventually they coalesce into a single point of darkness, from which all evil emanates. My mother-in-law blames hip hop. My friend Pablo's dad blames everything on Al Gore. Another curmudgeon I know points to badly formatted HTML.

I like to think I'm a couple of decades from choosing my personal Root of All Evil, and a lot could change by then. I suspect I'll blame nanobots, climactic change, or maybe the zombies. Then again, I think all of these will be traceable back to Karl Rove.

Comments

[jlr]

I believe that her "point of darkness" was Rap music, not hip hop. I'm just saying...