Evil and Elephant hunting!

[shane justice]

For my friends Spectre and Munk....

Over the last couple weeks I have opened the ball on three pretty interesting topics...I got to hear from some smart folks...who showed wisdom...and compassion. Thank you for sharing your thoughts generously...I learned more than I shared.

I have lead a funny life. Funny strange...not funny haha...

I have been blessed and cursed...by having a mind that does not work quite properly...and a sense of humor that is skewed by irony...

Having said that I wanted to write about something that I thought about when I was at the bottom of the food chain...very nearly as low as one can go...and gladly far away from where I am now....

It is about Evil....and why Evil is like hunting elephants....

Now before you laugh and roll your eyes..and start thinking...Aww Shane's been nipping at the Scotch he saves for snakebites...hear me out....

I grew up reading the great African adventures...those of us who have done so are forever changed....

Capstick was and still is my absolute favorite.

IN one of his books, Death in the Long Grass,(pg. 62) ol Pete says,"....it has always amazed me how anything so god-awful big as an elephant can be so hard to spot in cover. Possibly, it is the optical phenomenon of its very size not offering a recognizable view of the whole animal when the silhouette is broken by even fairly light bush. Elephants under most close range hunting conditions, appears as small pathces of whatever color dit they have been dusting in. Even when he locates the animal, the hunter faces the problem of determining the size of the ivory which way the animal is facing and what portion of anatomy the patch of hide showing represents."

It seems that the sheer size of an elephants made it impossible to see as a whole. You can hear the bubbling in that hollow cavity in its trunk...(the one the military studied to develop Ultra Low Frequency)...you can even get close enough to hear it guts processing foliage...you can smell it...I daresay you could sense the bulk of the creature...but see it you cannot.

IN the middle of the night...after a particular ugly day...where I had watched a man slash his wrists to ribbons with the broken remains of a Pint whiskey bottle...I sat on a cold beach. As I watched the breakers roll in from the Pacific...and I saw that Capstick was right...

Satan...the Devil...Evil...the Anti-Christ is not among us as a single entity.
Like he is in the movies...a single monster...acting as the focal point for all our fear and hatred...and then the hero does his thing..and that is that.

Evil is like that old murderous bull elephant in the deep bush. He is so big...and so ugly...and so damn spiteful...and invisible...because he is hiding in the fabric of humanity. All we can see at any given time is a tiny patch of his hide. A newspaper headline...or a sound bite...or a flash of anger in our heart...

We can smell the evil, we can hear it....we can feel it around ur...but damned if we can see it.

Because evil is inside of us....it is a little piece of each of us. Each of us makes up a part of the huge beast...and the more we allow ourselves to be controlled by negative emotion...the bigger the beast gets...and the harder it becomes to see it...in it's spiritual camoflage...

Thus each human is a part of keeping the beast at bay. The battle exists in our hearts as we ponder the questions of life.

But he is there...like a cancerous cell in the celestial body. There is no way to cut it out without destroying the health of the host.

SO we struggle not to feed it...and we hope that goodness and light will keep the tusker where he belongs...

And that is why Evil is like elephant hunting.

Good night.

Shane

 

[munk]

What a damned good story.

Yeppers. That's it.

I've been talking to this real neat gal when I go to pick my son up from Kindergarten. She likes me too, I can tell. The four of us, she and her husband, and I and my wife, are planning on getting together soon in our part of Eastern Montana to become better friends. He wants to make knives and I think he'll do it, too. She and I are very sympatico- we understand one another and laugh at the same jokes.
The other day I asked about her husband.

"Now, he knows I'm on the up and up, right, that I have no Evil Designs upon you?"

"Yes, " she said, laughing suddenly. "Evil designs, huh? No, you don't have those. You have a good heart."

"That's right," I told her, and turned to leave. I stopped and whirled around suddenly.

"Actually, that's not right." I looked at this nice looking lady, "I've got a few Evil Designs for you. In fact, now I think of it, I've lots of evil designs for many women, and many other people."

She was laughing hard and staring at me, wondering what I was going to say next.

"But I won't act upon those, and you," I told her, " are a very nice lady."



munk

 

[Spectre]

There's a flip side.

We are also all part of God. All that is, we are.

Must be my bedtime.

John

 

[tychoseven]

Excellent story, Shane. The analogy is indeed apt.

...I wish I could comment further, but I have not the words for it.... I feel that I'd only be derailing your thread, and I so enjoy the experiences everyone has to share that I'm just gonna close my mouth now and enjoy...

-T7-