When I was a kid--whoa!  A long time ago!!--Westerns were great films.  Whether it was just a cowboy movie where at one point the guy with the white hat shot the guy with the black hat, or it was a cowboy and Indian movie, the theme was simple.  Good guys vs Bad guys.  It took me too many years to come to the awareness that the "Indians" were not bad guys, but CITIZENS of THEIR country.  Who were the illegal aliens then?

     I remember with embarrassment, a close priest friend, telling a Marriage Encounter gathering that "Chief," one of the presenting team, was a GOOD Indian, not like the Hollywood Indians!  We all cringed and Chief proceeded to chop off his head with his Tomahawk!

     In the world today, as WESTERNERS, we take it for granted that we know who the good guys and the bad guys are.  We forget that for the terrorists, we are the bad guys and the terrorists!

     In our families, in our neighborhoods, in our circle of friends, we have a tendency to label people as good guys and bad guys.  It's terrible when we do it in the context of family--the good child, the bad child, the good aunt, the bad uncle, the good parent, the bad parent!

     What will it take for us to get passed good guys and bad guys?  As long as we stay stuck there, there is no possibility or hope of peace.  We will always risk killing the wrong bad (good) guy!  Yes, it gets very complicated!

     When it comes to good guys and bad guys, we are each at risk of being a "mistaken identity."  Those of us who are seen as good often have a very bad guy lurking in the shadows of our heart.  Those of us who are seen as bad are often desparate for someone to recognize the goodness lurking in our hearts.

     There may be some EVIL BAD force that reigns in the fires of hell and walks the earth looking for opportunities to spread evil.  I don't know.  I haven't seen it if it exists.  What I do see every day are PEOPLE who do not know how to make sense out of all the bad things that occur, and so they have to find someone to blame, and whoever they find, they label as the BAD people.

     I also see PEOPLE, sometimes entire ethnic groups, who have been brutally victimized to the point of genocide, turning around and perpetrating the same crimes on other ethnic groups.  What I see are PEOPLE who are so afraid of EVIL that they perpetuate EVIL as a defense against it.

     So what can we teach our children about good guys and bad guys?  Well, perhaps the only thing we can teach them about good guys and bad guys is the way we, as the big people, live our moment to moment life.  We are just people, all of us trying to make our way.  Perhaps the good guy vs bad guy labels dissolve when we can take the risk to touch each other rather than drop bombs on each other.  Those bombs can be the explosives that drop out of planes or the explosives that come out of our mouths as we strategically destroy the people we do not understand.  Perhaps we can stop trying to figure out evil and simply live as GOOD people.  At what costs?  The cost we fear paying if we simply live as good people, is ironically the same price we pay when we decide that we have to destroy the bad guys!