Though I’m not very religious, I like to think that I’m pretty moral. Lately I’ve been trying harder and harder to be a good person, and when thinking how I can achieve this spiritual purity, I’ve come to begrudgingly accept that there are very few neutral actions these days. Almost everything I do involves some sort of inactive participation in evil.

For example, at K-Mart I’m occasionally asked to work the cigarette register in which I’ve sold cancer sticks to pregnant women. I can’t help but liken this to physician assisted suicide. I’m basically helping people kill themselves and hurt others around them with their secondhand smoke. (I passionately believe that smoking is perhaps the single most stupid thing a person could do to himself.) What do I do? Refuse to sell cigarettes and lose my job?

As a checkout operator, I usually have two or three people a week who come through with over fifty dollars worth of candy. Going off on a slight tangent here, I think that candy is a highly underrated health impediment. Candy is like cigarettes. Candy will kill you. That concentrated sugar and saturated fat is addictive; it’ll make you obese; plus it will increase your risk for diabetes, heart disease, high cholesterol, stroke, and so on. The more you eat, the worse it is. It’s like cigarettes marketed for kids. Anyway.

Of course, there is the perennial classic: taxes. I don’t know if they still do, but tax dollars used to go to subsidize abortions. If I pay my taxes, I’m helping abortion. I’m also helping burdens of society (druggies) and promoting war and the military. If I don’t pay my taxes, I go to jail and become a modern-day martyr, but for who? No one will know that I’m in jail, much less why I’m in jail.

What is there to do? I don’t think there is any way to completely dissociate oneself from evil, save from living on a small crappy island and avoiding all human contact. And suppose one did that to avoid participating in wrong, then how would one participate in what is right? No one does much good alone on an island.

I guess I’ll continue to do what I’m told to do and sell the cigarettes. I won’t be able to get very far if I refuse to take part in anything tinged with evil, since basically everything is.

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