Why Shouldn’t We Want Evil To Die?

It’s only been one day since the man who caused the needless deaths of over 100,000 Americans, and I’m sick of hearing the lying refrain: “We all want the president to do well and pull through.” Even his wretched base of doesn’t really care whether Trump pulls through. Why should the rest of us?

The same day that Trump announced (by twitter of course) that he had contracted Covid-19, a New York Times headline read: “Trump Virtually Cuts Off Refugees as He Unleashes a Tirade on Immigrants.”

It was subtitled, “The Trump administration said it would lower the annual cap on refugees further into rock-bottom record territory as President Trump pursues pre-election xenophobic attacks.”

Catholics and Christians, how can you support this man? Didn’t Jesus say, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me?”

For the last four years Donald Trump has been channeling sewage from the American psyche and projecting it onto Democrats and anyone that dare protests, even as he poses as the victim of the Deep State and the mainstream media.

There are nearly 210,000 Americans dead from Covid-19, and infections are approaching 8 million. Scientists and epidemiologists say there would be less than 100,000 dead if precautions were properly taken in February, when the sob is on record admitting he knew how serious this virus is.

So the clichés ‘poetic justice’ and ‘karma’ don’t even begin to cover the cosmic reckoning for thus poor excuse for a man now hospitalized with Covid, just days after he mocked Joe Biden for wearing a face mask.

The deeper question for us as citizens and human beings is this: Given that the

nation and world would be better off if Donald Trump died, why shouldn’t we wish him dead? If Trump isn’t evil, he certainly acts out of extreme collective darkness.

The spiritual response is clear, and as decent people we have to strive to come up to the mark rather than sink down into the muck.

First, we aren’t God and cannot know what is best in matters of life and death. Though my faith has faltered lately, I still feel there is such a thing as what Christian’s call “God’s plan.” And as inscrutable as it is, even the devil (which is a man-made thing) plays its role within it.

Put in more prosaic and secular language, we aren’t omniscient, and it is hateful to wish someone, however baleful, dead.

In any case, I don’t believe there is a “Supreme Being” that is omniscient either. But there is immanent intelligence, and how it unfolds within us has much to do with how we respond to man’s evil.

Therefore the second reason for not wishing Trump dead is that though the Trump Administration is demonstrably evil, none of us is without darkness. “Judge not lest ye be judged” is one of the greatest truisms in any language.

Besides, as distorted as he and the thing that pulls his strings is is, we can use Trump and the darkness he embodies as a mirror to illuminate our own darkness. Doing so, we turn the tables on evil since the last thing it wants us to do is deeply learn about ourselves from our encounters with it.

Indeed, every time we respond with learning about ourselves, rather than some pose of compassion and pretence of well wishes, we weaken evil by eroding the very ground it stands on, which is within each one of us.

During the 300 years of the Jesus Movement before Catholicism became codified and crystallized as the Roman Catholic Church, there was a belief in some circles that in the end even the devil would repent and be absorbed into the “body of Christ.”

I wouldn’t go that far, but I’m sure the devil is human. Nor am I saying Trump is the devil, though I doubt the Donald will have some deathbed road-to-Damascus conversion.

I’m simply saying that without mouthing respectable platitudes like “we all want the president to do well and pull through,” we can withhold judgment, look in the mirror, and truly want what’s best for the American people and humanity.

Doing so, we are co-participants in the messy emergence of intelligent life on Earth. And even if things continue to go badly for humankind, we will not have contributed to the death wish for our planet and species that Trump has personified.

Watching his short goodbye video again on his way to the hospital, for the first time I feel a pang of pity for Donald Trump. As twisted as he is and as hard as it’s been to see, he’s all too human.

Martin LeFevre

The post Why Shouldn’t We Want Evil To Die? first appeared on The Costa Rican Times.