TWO DOGS

George Bernard Shaw: "A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, 'The one I feed the most.'"

Whenever we do something wrong and then begin to wonder why in the world we did it, our only response -- and most honest response -- is to admit that we must have been feeding the wrong dog. We feed both evil and good, both right and wrong. More often than not we are not all that aware of what we are doing. It is only after we have been caught in the bad or been complimented for the good we did that we come to realize that we made what happened happen.

Good feeds off good and evil feeds off evil. It always has and always will for both. The evil of Hitler's Germany began with a single wrong and escalated into the killing of millions of innocent people by other people who, had they been asked before the evil began, would have insisted with every fiber of their being that they would never do such a thing, not participate in such atrocities, not in a million years they wouldn't. But they did, did they not?

How did they come to the point were doing evil took over their lives? They fed it and fed on it so much so that, in the end, it may not even have occurred to them that what they were doing was evil. They had come to convince themselves that what the evil they were doing was, if fact, a good.

Now we may protest and say that they were only fooling themselves, maybe even lying. Anyone in his right mind would know that Dachau was immoral. If that is true, then what happened is that their feeding of evil, slowly but surely, came to cloud their thinking. Evil overcame good because evil and not good was being fed.

The opposite is also true. We can overcome evil by feeding good with good, by doing good. Remaining strong in the face of evil is not easy. It is always easier to give in. That is why feeding the good dog can never be taken for granted. When we become lax in our attention to doing good, we will stop doing good, stop feeding the good dog and start feeding the bad one.

We know that. But knowing is not enough. Ask anyone who is caught in an evil act why he did it, his first response will not be "because I wanted to." It will be "I don't know. I don't know how I ended up in this mess." Upon reflection he would have to admit that he had been feeding the wrong dog and may not have been as aware of what he was doing as he should have been.

We all make excuses for our sinful deeds, make them to others and make them to ourselves. It may be human nature, and I suspect it is. Nevertheless, we must not take lightly anything we do, good or bad, about which dog we feed.