Every culture has criminal element

Sometimes it pays to listen to the radio in the car. Being a serious Sirius aficionado, I usually do not tune in to regular broadcasts. Perhaps, as I discovered while using my wife's car to move items, I should listen more often.

Had I not done so, I would not have heard the NPR story about 1,200 cars being set on fire in France on New Year's Eve. Apparently this is kind of an annual frolic which some French have adopted in recent years; welcome a new year, burn a car. I wonder how they celebrated the millennium??

It's apparently such an issue that the government has adopted several strategies, so far unsuccessful, in the last few years to deal with it. In other words, it wasn't just a 2012 thing.

The commentator went on to explain that, even allowing for gang violence against rival gang members' cars, it still left many of the torched autos as presumably the property of innocent victims chosen at random.

The important part of that phrase is "gang violence." You mean (gasp!) they have gangs in France?

Please understand that I am not maligning our Gallic neighbors and long-term allies across the ocean. Au contraire, speaking of anything French is really a matter of me choosing first person or third person pronoun, since my mom's family lineage includes French roots. (I think my granddad used to say anybody with any sense left there "about the time we did," a span measured in centuries not decades.)

The point, rather, of this column is that it is unrealistic, though popular in some circles recently, to hold up European countries as paradigms of crime free existence — or, for that matter, to so venerate our neighbors to the north, as is often done in the same circles. If you remember, the arguably most gruesome psychotic killer apprehended in 2012 was fleeing, not from the U.S., but from Canada.

Human nature seems to urge us to produce facts or statistics that back up our opinions, and the veneration of European countries as crime free Shangri-Las, contrasted with our "savage" approach to life, is an example of the same syndrome.

Among the realities of life is the realization that, since the dawn of humanity, every culture has included a criminal element who felt it their right to live at the expense of, or do willful harm to, law abiding members of that same culture.

Judeo-Christian tradition calls it "original sin."

Like water seeking a course of least resistance, if unchecked these persons will find a way to practice their mayhem, even when idealists would like to believe otherwise. Just ask the 1,200 Frenchmen whose cars were burned on New Year's Eve.

Clyde Davis is a Presbyterian pastor and teacher at Clovis Christian High School. He can be contacted at:

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