News and Commentary

Photos Of Good And Evil

   DailyWire.com

In the grey area of politics and culture, where one man’s policy is another man’s poison; or in a pop culture that ranges from the uplifting to the despicable, it is rare to see a story where it is pretty much good versus evil, and there are photographs to match.

On February 15, 2017, a woman noticed something horrible as she was walking her toddler around a park in Daytona Beach, Florida. So horrible, in fact, that she headed straight home and told her husband, US Navy veteran Gary Blough, what she had seen.

The photo of Good in this story is a photo of a middle-aged man with a black eye, swollen face, broken skull and facial bones, a concussion and internal bleeding.

Good in this story got up, left the safety of his house and went out to confront two young men: Ryan Ponder and Johnnie Beveritt. Their combined picture is a snapshot of evil.

It’s a simple tale of good versus evil, because Ponder, Beveritt and an unnamed 16-year-old minor, had proceeded to punch and kick Blough, and did not stop punching and kicking him until help arrived, at which point they ran away.

They were punching and kicking Blough, fracturing his skull, bashing his eye to the point of needing surgery, because Blough had approached these three individuals and asked them to stop what they were doing. What they were doing was reaching down, picking up a turtle, and then smashing it against the concrete, again and again, so hard and for so long that one of the animal’s legs was found in a nearby tree.

You really should take a close look at the faces of Blough, Ponder and Beveritt; compare the battered, middle-aged and gentle-looking face of disabled Navy vet Blough, versus the two strong young men in their physical prime. Pay special attention to Ponder and Beveritt, because we will certainly see their faces again; we as a society, I mean. The next time they get their mug shots taken may be for killing a person and not a turtle, and that story, of course, will not make the news the way a defenseless animal, later discovered dead and floating in a pool of blood in the lake, makes the news. Bashing turtles to death is newsworthy while bashing people to death is so commonplace. But society will see these faces again.

Some people look at creatures like these three monsters and ask themselves what happened to them to make them so inhuman, so incapable of compassion or remorse, so willing to strike again and again until the shell, or the skull, make a cracking sound and then, in both cases, to continue bashing and stomping until help arrived.

It is not about what happened to them. It is about what did not happen to them.

Human males – these three are not boys and they most certainly are not men — are capable of this kind of behavior because virtually all predatory animals are capable of it: from cats playing with mice, or male lions eating the cubs of the aging alpha male they have just displaced, or chimpanzees on a war party looking to rip monkeys or other chimps to shreds and eat them raw. This is how animals behave, and this is the kind of animal behavior that happens when a gentle and strong father does not instill in young boys the sense of compassion, of decency, of restraint, and both moral and physical courage that was most obviously instilled in Gary Blough.

It is not about what happened to them. It is about what did not happen to them.

Oh, and by the way: if we don’t like these kind of behaviors; if you are repelled by the sight of three men repeatedly bashing a defenseless turtle to death against concrete sidewalks; or if you are somewhat concerned that humans like Ponder and Beveritt seem to be increasing in numbers while those like Blough become rarer and rarer…

…well, then perhaps we should stop ordering and paying for such people. Maybe we should rethink the incentive structure that pays a person additional money for every fatherless boy brought into the world. Maybe if we did not subsidize such base cruelty so intensely and for so long, then perhaps we would get less of it.

Somehow.

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