Peeling 'tots the other night, I was struck by how immensely popular movies about good versus evil are and how they find a home in our culture and become part of our vocabulary. Why? Name one good reason why nearly everyone in the U.S. has seen....the original (Yes, George Lucas, the prequels were shit) Star Wars Trilogy? Or Lord of the Rings? Or the Matrix?

These movies all feature a classic battle of good versus evil. We like to think that we have a monopoly on doing good things just because we can, just because we're human (research has shown that other species are motivated by what we would also describe as "charitable" acts - dogs and cats routinely adopt newborn animals abandoned by their parents and raise them, horses raise the horses of other parents, dolphins look after and protect the weaker members of the pod). We all want to think we are good, because we can't face the truth.

Evil isn't some alien invasion, some upwelling of artificial intelligence run awry machinery, some battle thick with spilled midoclorians, or some invading evil sorcerer looking to dominate the world.

It's the mother who kills her three year old, hides the body, and denies the crime.

It's the father who goes and gets planning permission to expand his basement, where he proceeds to rape and impregnate his daughter again and again over the course of twenty years.

It's the man who turns to his companion on the bus, and with no warning or provacation, slices off his head.

It's the police officer who shoots his wife to death, and then turns around to shoot to death a migrant worker he's hired for the day to frame him for the crime.

It's the man who strangles his wife, nearly full term pregnant with his first born son, and then tosses her body out into the ocean right before Christmas. Hey, asshole, I hope you are enjoying prison!

It's the man who has his wife murdered in front of his children because she was going to divorce him and expose his drug laundering activities.

It's the person who hits a six year old child and flees the scene, leaving the child to die.

Evil is much easier to deal with, to envision dealing with, with we give it an external focus, a name, and make it a big scary monster. Look at how heroic we are, lining up to go to our deaths as we fight the big evil alien invader; yet in contrast, look at how dumb we look, stepping in front of that homicidial maniac and trying to stop him.

These movies fascinate us, you see, because we can't bear to look under our own beds because we know the monster is, in fact, us. Bloody Mary, indeed.

I want to know when we stopped, as a society, trying to do the right thing. When did we become so enamoured of our homes as our castles that we stopped saying hello to our neighbors? We stopped talking to folks we saw on walks with our dogs? We stopped making idle chit chat with the bagger at the grocery store? If you saw something going wrong, would you step in? If you saw a crime in progress, would you call the police? Would you stop it?