We hear a lot about "good" and especially about "evil" these days - far more than we used to, it seems to me. There are such things, I suppose, but I find the labels to be far too simplistic to describe most of what goes on in our world. Their use seems to mostly represent an effort to gain some political advantage.

I am especially distressed by the flip modern usage under which the terms have morphed into "the good guys" and "the bad guys" - terms left over from hundreds of old cowboy movies whose producers were considerate enough to equip the good guys in white hats and the bad guys with black ones so we knew which was which. Our juvenile taste for these "oaters" may have been deplorable, but deep down we knew they were only movies - not real life. We knew that, after the cameras rolled, the dead bandits and Indians got up and collected their paychecks from the paymaster. Not so in real life.

Examined honestly and in the absence of propaganda, most of the bad guys turn out to be pretty much like most of the good guys, only on the other side. There are elements of bad - and good - in each of them. During World War I, in a sector where the English faced the Germans, a famous incident took place on either Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve, I forget which. The front was quiet and the soldiers from the two sides somehow managed to get together for a soccer game in No Man's Land. That conflict featured trench warfare and some of the bloodiest, most prolonged battles in history, so the incident is utterly remarkable.

I don't know if anybody got court-martialed or not - higher headquarters in London was said to have been outraged.

"Evil" is a good word to describe some of the things done by Germany during World War II, including especially the death camps of the holocaust, and is a good word to describe many other incidents in the past and present of other countries as well. But to go from that to pinning the tag of "evil" upon large numbers of people, much less upon whole armies, is a tricky business indeed. Most of them were simply following orders - trying to do their patriotic duty as public opinion in their country saw it, and often dying in the effort. I well remember walking through fields strewn with the bodies of young German soldiers and looking at them and wondering. We killed him - yes. We had to. But it was not because he was evil; it was simply because he was on the other side. We hope that his death served a good cause, or at least that it will bring victory closer and thus serve to end the carnage. But from a personal, humanitarian view, his death is a tragedy - a tragedy as great as would be the death of one of our own.

And, in those days, the elements of this grisly equation were pretty well understood and acknowledged. The extraordinary heroism of some of the things that Mao's soldiers did during the Long March was honored even while China's move toward communism was deplored.

Every conflict has similar stories on both sides. German towns have commemorative plaques listing the names of local soldiers killed in the war, as we do. By 1946 former German soldiers and American soldiers drank beer together and exchanged war stories.

My friend Hans was a German naval gunnery officer during the war and later became a PhD chemist in our lab. Werner von Braun took us to the moon. Given the chance, we would have killed Mao and Von Braun and all of them, as they would have killed us, but they were not evil - they were not "bad guys," they were simply on the other side. In these affairs we hope that our opponents were on the wrong side - if indeed there was a wrong side.

Even at the top, if all of the facts were known, it might be difficult to be sure who should be tagged "evil" and, especially, who should be tagged as "good." Desperate times often bring desperate measures. War Crimes Trials may sort some of it out, but War Crimes Trials are held by the winners. Given the chance, the losers could perhaps present an equally damning case against some of the winners.

So I am very skeptical about any talk of evil except that I concede that there is a certain amount of it in most of us - enough so that circumstances can lead us into disasters like the holocaust or the lynch mob.

"Evil" is an emotional word, and its use can stir up terrible passions, but it does little or nothing to help us understand or resolve conflicts. It is a word that generates heat - not light.

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Bill McDonald is a longtime Stillwater Township resident. He is an author whose most recent book "At the Oasis" tells stories from Stillwater's Oasis Cafe.