Peggy Noonan discusses our therapeutic culture, the media, and general reactions to the slaughter at Virginia Tech and concludes:
The most common-sensical thing I heard said came Thursday morning, in a hospital interview with a student who'd been shot and was recovering. Garrett Evans said of the man who'd shot him, "An evil spirit was going through that boy, I could feel it." It was one of the few things I heard the past few days that sounded completely true. Whatever else Cho was, he was also a walking infestation of evil. Too bad nobody stopped him. . .
She is right. When all the sociological, psychological, and deprivation-laden explanations and analyses are finished, we are left unalterably confronted with bottom-line evil. Jonah Goldberg concludes similarly:
The only meaning I can find supported by the horrific, heartrending evidence is that once again the mystery of evil has been corroborated, the permanence of tragedy confirmed.
No worldview that minimizes evil can withstand empirical scrutiny.