Guest Blog: GOOD, EVIL – WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?

Submitted by Guest Blogger: Veronica Hamel Kivela
Guest blog pieces do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the regular Insider Staff and are published as opinion pieces to generate discussion.

This guest blog will run weekly in as a series  of  parts 

GOOD, EVIL – WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?

As a young girl, I attended a Presbyterian Church. Our minister was quite clear in his belief that both good and evil exist in this world that God has made. His duty, as he saw it, was to explain the differences to his congregation educate us in the ways of judging each and detail the good life that could be ours if we followed the rules laid out by the church, our parents and our teachers. He also cautioned us regarding the pitfalls and pain that could befall us if we strayed too far from “the path”. America accepted it.

In my early ‘20’s, America experienced the 1960’s in all their glory. Many people were shocked at the rapid
acceptance of music glamorizing drugs and sex. They were also confused as to the ramifications and unsure what to do to stop what they believed to be the erosion of morality. However, it was not clearly defined so how could it be stopped?

Woodstock happened, with thousands of our young completely destroying a privately owned farm, trampling the fields and using the land as a bathroom. The rampant use of drugs and “free” sex along with the anti-establishment rhetoric reverberated through college campuses across America. College students were being convinced by their liberal professors to believe they were no longer students but elevated by passion to the position of teachers. Armed “hippie” rebels who took over the campus at Cornell University were not arrested, but praised by its president. The message they spread was that everything about America was wrong and only the young could turn things around, aided by LSD to help them see reality clearly and guns to convince opponents of the justness of their cause. Just what impressionable college age young people wanted to hear. They appointed themselves therapists/pastors/saviors of us all.

America veered down a strange and unfamiliar path, twisting reality out of shape until it was no longer discernible  by most average Americans. All this, to satisfy mob agendas that are accorded legitimacy even today. Hippies were portrayed as peace-loving, docile lovers of all mankind. They wanted only to abolish all war, redistribute someone else’s wealth so that everyone had an equal amount of everything. They insisted, because they truly believed, that there would be no victims, no consequences. The problem was they were willing to destroy other people’s property to force their peace onto mankind. Hence the guns. So much for promoting peace. America accepted it.


This new (or not so new) philosophy pervaded the education system, the music and entertainment worlds, the clothing industry, the churches and even politics. We gradually saw an increase in the creation of feel-good agencies such the EPA that only wanted to save plants and animals, again with no negative impact on mankind. We saw a rise in television shows portraying fathers as bumbling indecisive fools lucky the rest of the family lets them live there. This was the new entertainment.

When President John Kennedy was assassinated, America grieved while in a state of shock. How could this
happen? Where did we go wrong? Rather than delve too deeply into what was happening to our culture, we settled for being told who fired that shot? Lee Harvey Oswald – THERE’S the only culprit!

The Viet Nam War raged on while we offered up our sons to be killed in a war our government had no intention of winning. It was still the age of believing what we saw on television, what we read in the newspapers and what our politicians told us was true. America accepted it.