Chilling

 

“Eyewitness to Evil”: a remarkable account of being at the Texas capitol as HB 2 was debated

 

By Dave Andrusko
During those awful last few days in Texas when in a bid to derail HB 2 pro-abortionists harassed, taunted, and threatened pro-lifers, we did our best to convey how afraid many people really were—and with good reason!
Andrew Bair, NRLC’s Field Coordinator, did an excellent job. (See “Abortion mob sinks to new low: threatens legislators, bill supporters”; “Texas State Sen. Wendy Davis and the reinvention of the pro-abortion movement”; and “Just how far will pro-abortionists go? A look back at the battle in Texas.”)

But it was not until I read Emma Smith’s extraordinary “Eyewitness to Evil” that I fully understood just how the omnipresent, ear-shattering noise unsettled pro-lifers, or how hard it would be to avoid the conclusion that a “dark force” was hovering over the nightmarish proceedings.
When something is written as well as “Eyewitness to Evil,” I try to make only a few observations and encourage NRL News Today readers to read the entire post (in these case, 2,237-words) for themselves. Her writing is so powerful you will be swept along and come away eager to share her account with your friends.

Occasionally I have been in settings where, as Ms. Smith writes, “the ground shook from their chanting.” The first thought that crosses your mind is that this cannot turnout well.
But there was something else in Austin that day that Smith captures in her opening paragraph:

“Every time the doors of the capitol opened and a burst of unadulterated noise broke into the open, I felt as though a wave of evil passed over the Austin landscape. Orange shirts outside sneered and laughed, and I always felt as though some dark force was looming over the Texas capitol – despite the fact that there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.”

 

It would be unfair to categorize every abortion supporter as consciously in league with that “dark force.” Which makes what happened all the scarier: their hysteria—and I use the word advisedly—was in service of, if not inspired by something else. She continued

“That’s all I could see. Orange. A moving, monumental blob of screaming, chanting, stomping, clapping, sign-waving, orange. The noise was even more deafening in the rotunda. I cannot describe to you, or anyone, the absoluteness of that noise. It got into your bones. Your ears couldn’t feel pain it was so loud. Your ears couldn’t even really hear it, it was so loud. It shook the building. It rose and fell in an odd, almost creepy cadence. The rhythm kept the momentum, and the noise became its own being. It was no longer human made, it was not lead by humans; it was its own master. The noise led the people. The noise guided the energy in the room. The noise was not at the service of the people; the people were at the service of the noise.”

And then there follows what are, for me, the key sentences in this extraordinary account:

“You either became a part of it, or you fought against its controlling power the entire time you were in the rotunda. Those participating in the noise looked almost dead – their eyes lifeless, or, if they did have life, it was an angry sort of life in their eyes reflected nothing but anger, pain, hurt, and hatred. Those who became one with the noise became the rhythm of the noise – their bodies moved eerily to the beat of the chanting. They swayed back and forth, or stomped in time to the omnipotent music it created.”

She adds, almost unnecessarily,

“Every fiber of my being was terrified.”

If I go much further into “Eyewitness to Evil,” I would be taking away from the impact. Let me just say that how Smith describes beginning the rosary to combat the hate-filled chants from the screaming mob of pro-abortionists is nothing short of remarkable.

Source: NRLC News