Carlie Brucia has been on my thoughts lately. Abducted, then raped and murdered, she died as nobody should, especially not an eleven year old. The video surveillance camera shows her being quietly led off, her hand in the man's, as if adult authority is not to be challenged. This is a powerful, disturbing, scene, and one that reaches into human nature itself.
The social fabric is tissue-thin, sustained by the illusion. We laugh at Jay Leno, scorn Saddam Hussein, as we watch their phosphate images on television screens. They are social constructs, thousands of miles away; yet they are closer in mind than our next door neighbors, many of whom we do not know. Let the economy collapse, nuclear holocaust erupt, and see how quickly the constructs disappear.
Brutally, suddenly, Carlie Brucia discovered that the world is not as it seems. A father myself, I feel her parents' anguish when I think of her. Despite years of sordid news events, I still ask Why?
At this moment as you read these words, somebody somewhere is raped, murdered, robbed, tortured, or discovers a cancerous tumor.
Like the bumper stickers proclaiming Shit happens, so does evil. We think of it as monstrous, satanic in proportions, its quintessential image the jetliners slamming into the World Trade Center. But it is banal--trite, common-place, everyday. The Al Qaeda terrorists smiled at the lady when they checked out of the hotel. They said thank you to the ticket agent at the airline counter. A neighbor describes Joseph P. Smith, arrested for killing Carlie, as playing with his three daughters, buying them a puppy, building them a goldfish pond.
In a post-modern, deconstructionist, world, the term evil may sound outmoded, but I believe it exists. I must believe so. Otherwise, things make no sense to me. I cannot shrug away the horrible fate of Carlie as tough luck.
Carlie's is the world as I find it and it must be faced.
Albert Camus' The Plague is about fight, not against disease, not against German soldiers, but against indifference to human evil and suffering.
Camus believed that in each of us a spark of goodness smolders, which we can choose to fan into flame, and with this novel he develops his belief. For Camus, actions define the man and the citizens of his novelistic city have defined themselves into meaninglessness.
The people of Oran, Algeria, are alienated from one another. In torrid summers, they stay indoors, shutters closed, each turned in on himself. "The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits. Our citizens work hard, but solely with the object of getting rich." Involved in his own concerns, each is removed from society and the common welfare. Life is ennui, meaningless. The plague changes everything. It offers people a chance to regain meanings.
Like evil, an epidemic belongs not to a person but to communities. Evil for Camus is indeed a plague and something we must fight against. We cannot doubt it exists. As the townspeople gather together they discover new meaning; their lives are shaped by belief in the good of community and hatred of the plague.
Tarrou, an outsider, cannot stand to see human suffering ignored by the masses. To correct this, he gathers sanitary squads, formerly complacent men now eager for difficult daily jobs. Tarrou explains, "All I maintain is that there are on this Earth pestilences and there are victims, and it's up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences."
That is my belief and with every news item about Carlie Brucia I am reminded of it.
