You watch news stories like this one, and you start thinking that Margaret Sanger happened for a reason.
THE STORY ABOVE, as reported by Heath Allen of Channel 6 in New Orleans, is the horrific tale of an infant -- born to a family of rustics in the piney woods of Louisiana -- who was beaten, drugged and burned, yet none of her Deliverance-cast kinfolk professes to know what the hell happened to her.
Except grampaw. He knows what happened.
"Some crazed maniac done this to my grandbaby," he tells Allen.
Do you think?
Anyway, I watched this story, and it occurred to me this just drives home a point we all need to remember -- great evil often is a response to great horror. Margaret Sanger saw how the poor, the swarthy and the "colored" lived back in the day, and she thought, probably, a couple of things.
One, they'd be better off dead.
Two, we'd be better off if they were dead. Or at least if they didn't breed.
Trouble is, genocide is a murderously bad solution for intractable economic and social maladies. The dignity of you deny and the life you take of "The Other" today surely will be your own tomorrow, for you're some other's Other.
So, what solutions do we have to sociological deviance like what we see in the video above? Short of Planned Parenthood-style eugenics and abortion, that is?
I suspect it involves an army of teachers, preachers and social workers -- a solution we like to give lip service but rarely try to implement in any serious manner.
Lord have mercy on that little child. And may whoever harmed that baby rot in jail forever and ever, amen.