Garth George: Evil deeds and dictatorship appalling

I can't remember the last time I was shocked at any form of human behaviour. After 74 years on this Earth, 50 of them as a newspaper journalist, I guess I've seen it, read it, or heard it all.

I have come to terms with the bottomless depth and the galactic breadth of man's inhumanity to man and, increasingly these days, woman's inhumanity to woman.

But there are still things that happen, both at home and abroad, that raise my eyebrows or cause me to shake my head in despair. Quite a few have been in the news lately.

So has political skulduggery. I never thought I would see the day when any New Zealander was denied recourse to the law of the land. That the Key Government would even consider such a move is beyond me.

But it has. In a fit of pique over losing out to the courts on the question of payments to family to look after severely disabled people, the Government forced through a law to remedy the matter, at least for some.

But in so doing it ruled that the Human Rights Review Tribunal and the courts are not allowed to look at the Government's family care policy and decide whether or not it is unlawfully discriminatory.

In a democracy, this is intolerable and I am staggered that there has not been a vast hue and cry aimed at getting that provision removed from the legislation. It is the not-so-thin end of the wedge of dictatorship.

But back to woman's inhumanity to woman.

This week a 17-year-old schoolgirl appeared in an Auckland court on two charges of doing an indecent act on a girl under 12, unlawful sexual connection and making intimate visual recordings.

In Jinhua in eastern China a newborn baby was flushed by its mother down a toilet and was saved from the sewer only because neighbours heard it crying and called firefighters and doctors.

There was the sad, sad case of the woman who refused point blank to change her seat on an Air NZ aircraft so a young woman in a wheelchair could have some comfort on the hour-long flight.

My prayer is that the psychopathically recalcitrant "elite" female passenger never finds herself disabled.

And in Napier a woman is facing a charge of failing to provide the necessaries of life to her elderly mother, who was found fused to her furniture and a blanket after apparently being confined to a couch for at least three years.

Lack of respect for and abuse of the elderly, of whom I will in not too many years become one, seems to be in the increase, although it could simply be that there is more awareness of it and more people are reporting it.

Elder abuse, along with paedophilia and other child abuse and cruelty to animals, is among a number of things which I just can't get my head around.

I know that they happen - increasingly it seems - but they are beyond my understanding.

Reports of elderly folk being mistreated and/or ripped off either at home by family members or by "caregivers" in rest homes and other facilities are cropping up almost week by week.

So I wonder why it is that in spite of all the evidence of inhumanity, the humanists still tell us that man is inherently good. That, dear reader, is the biggest lie ever perpetrated on Mankind.

Because the truth is that man and woman are born inherently evil. As the Old Testament of the Bible says, the wickedness of man is great in the Earth, and every thought of his heart is only evil continually.

The antidote to that is to be found in the New Testament. But that's a story for another day.