Tragedy

It is one of the saddest realities of our modern world that prejudice and hate often rear their ugly heads through acts of gross violence. Yet that is precisely what happened this month. Unfathomable bigotry took the lives of 77 innocent men, women, and youth in Norway.

To dwell excessively here on the evil ideology that precipitated this tragic event would be to give undue attention to the deluded ideas of a shameless man who has, according to many accounts, perpetrated this evil for the explicit purpose of advertising his shocking racism. We cannot play into his scheme. So even as we peremptorily reject and condemn the violence and its underpinning dogma that we witnessed this month, we must focus our thoughts toward the victims of so heinous an act and seek to rebuild the worlds that have come under such violent attack.

At the same, however, to dismiss altogether the virulent ideas that led to such atrocity would be to ignore the dangerous, baleful influence that attitudes of foreignness, when taken to their utmost extreme, can have. We cannot sit passively in the face of evil; we cannot turn a blind eye to this cancer that festers in our society.

We thus have a fine and difficult line to walk as onlookers to this shocking event.

Perhaps we can reflect, then, during this sad and sombre month, upon the stakes of our task of extirpating all forms of hate and racism from our society. It is tragic indeed that it takes events like this to remind us of the dire need for a world free from prejudice. Perhaps they can spur us to greater heights in our quest to build once and for all a peaceful, tolerant world.