Word: evil
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...psyche drove the strange moonfaced man's mind to crack at that moment, or why he chose the gentlest, most innocent of the school's 729 pupils to be the victims of his inner torments (see Essay). For those who lived through it, the questions have but one answer. "Evil visited us yesterday," said Ron Taylor, the school's headmaster and one of the first to reach the scene of the killings. "We don't know why, we don't understand it, and I guess we never will...
...authorities can only put together the sequence of events that led to the evil of Dunblane. The start might be traced back as far as 1974, when Boy Scout officials dismissed Hamilton, then 21, for "inappropriate behavior" as leader of a local troop, and to subsequent incidents involving his attempts to organize boys' sports clubs in the area. Or it might have arisen from his fascination with handguns, which he obtained as long as 20 years ago and owned legally despite strict British laws. But whatever its origins, the culmination came at around 9 a.m. Wednesday when Hamilton left...
...some thought him a "sicko" and "a loner," no one could have foreseen the depth of evil in their midst. At the local morgue, hospital chaplain Jim Benson comforted parents as they identified their children. But no words, no memorials or visits by the Queen will make it easier for a parent to comprehend that a son, a daughter is never going to wake again. After one mother looked at her dead child, she turned to Benson and said, "My baby always sleeps like that...
...what was to come, then a mere gun-amuck mind or a squalor of pedophiliac-itch-gone-violent seemed an inadequate, trivializing explanation--almost sacrilegious in its asymmetry. Almost everyone, therefore, looked toward that last unopened door at the end of the moral corridor, the one with the word Evil...
...evil exists, then what happened in the gymnasium at Primary 1 was evil. An eruption of such violence aimed at such targets, at such spotless innocence and hope, cannot be comprehended or diagnosed in language that is less than absolute. "Haywire" won't do. "Psychotic," "maniac" and so on suggest mere dysfunction, or else a morally neutral spasm of the reptilian brain, a bug or two in the limbic system. Nor is there much comfort in thinking that such behavior arises from some Darwinian maladaption. "Man has developed so rapidly," Loren Eiseley wrote, "that he has suffered a major loss...