I had a good cry today.
My social feeds are flooded with screenshots of court documents, horrific emails, sixteen-year-old girls' diaries. I try not to open my phone. Every time I do I'm exposed to evil beyond my imagination.
I feel powerlessness. Helplessness. Defeat. But mostly anger.
And the anger turns into justification! Part of me craves violence! Revenge! I want to see these people suffer. Not dead, but suffering. Slowly, until their souls break, just as they've broken thousands of children over God knows how many years or centuries.
My brain goes into overdrive, searching for rational answers. Is this what happens when people receive power? Are they only elevated to positions of power because of their capacity for this? Is this spiritual? Are these demons? All I know for certain is that evil exists and does so far more widely than we ever knew.
I think we're all familiar with what I would call "corporatized evil." The lithium mines in Africa. Sweatshops in China. The raping of our forests and oceans. This evil is diffuse, structural. It leaks as entropy through our economic systems, forcing us all to participate for our survival.
But these files. It's a different kind of evil. Inhabited evil. An evil I can only describe as "the intentional desecration of innocence." This evil finds pleasure in destroying innocence itself.
A child, a physical embodiment of potential, of innocence, of spiritual cleanliness. This evil transforms that gold into lead, turning potential, innocence and purity into trauma, into shame, into suffering. It's the literal inverse of alchemy. The anti-sacred.
Evil is entropy. The destruction of order, beauty, empathy. Love is negentropy. Order, understanding, holding potential without collapsing it. Love is stewardship.
And what's so terrifying, is even in disclosing these documents to the public, this evil destroys more innocence. For every eye that sees what exists in these files is an I who loses a sense of innocence. For every person who wants love, peace, stability, empathy? This shows them those realities are impossible. The poison spreads from the act itself, through the documentation, into our collective consciousness, into our understanding of how the world works on a fundamental scale.
This evil propagates by turning those of us who are here to love into those who must act with righteous violence. To do unto the enemy what hath been done unto our people, unto our children.
But when we fight because we've dehumanized our enemies and enjoy their suffering? That's this same evil propagating itself through us.
The question isn't whether or not to fight, but for which drive, which reason? Do we grieve for what we must do? Do we use the minimum force required? Do we maintain the humanity of even those we must stop?
The goal is to end desecration, not to become another desecrator, even if righteous. Especially if righteous. The difference lives inside and acts from the heart.
So… what is there to do? I don't know. Part of me thinks violent revolution is a tragic necessity. When cancer becomes too malignant, you cut it out surgically for the body to survive.
But I fear what we may become. That evil is so sly, so cunning, it will burrow from the hearts of the perpetrators into the hearts of the citizens. Even the French Revolution devoured its own children.
But I do truly believe there's another way: Stewardship.
The seed wants to become the tree, to become the fruit, to become the seed again. This is the sacred cycle. This is what wants to unfold. Evil forces those stages into entropy. Crushing the seed before it sprouts, poisoning the soil, twisting the sapling for pleasure, cutting down the tree just to watch it fall.
Love tends to the conditions for becoming. It removes obstacles. It protects when protection is needed. But fundamentally, it trusts the divine pattern and serves it. Stewardship is not ownership, and is not control.
I beg, please don't let the horror corrupt you into becoming what you hate. Hold the eternal rage without letting it metastasize into the same dehumanization we must oppose. Protect who you can protect, where you can, when you can. Sometimes that requires force, or violence. But it is inhabited by grief, not glee.
You don't need to be innocent to fight for innocence. You don't need to be undamaged to protect others from damage. But you MUST feel the difference between love and its desecration. And choose which side you're on with every action you take.
The people who serve entropy organize easily. They bind themselves through fear, blackmail, shared guilt, mutual protection of secrets. Destruction is so many times simpler than creation. But love doesn't need to organize that way. It is scattered, it is decentralized, it is voluntary. There's no blackmail holding us into shape.
Love doesn't scheme. It does not need to.
I'm looking around right now. I see you looking too. I hope Love finds itself, through each other. The stakes are real and the battle is fierce. But something tells me love always wins in the end.
So I will tend to the garden I can reach. I will protect what I can protect. I will not look away, but I will not let this make me into what I hate. This is a spiritual war.