Originally posted on Facebook HERE
Lazy morning here. It’s a snow day in Wisconsin. Supposed to be a lot of it over the next few days. Most people I know have planned to basically do nothing today. Stay home. Hope the power stays on. Travel is being heavily discouraged. So everything slows down. Things get cancelled and rescheduled. It’s a great time to get a few things done you’ve been kicking down the road for a while. Or not. Maybe just be lazy. Watch TV in your underwear all day. It’s like total freedom. And here it is after 2PM already and I’m just now sitting to write this – the 452nd week of the “Looking Out My Back Window” series of posts. Usually written in the morning, but not today. Today I’m free to do whatever I want whenever I want. No pressure. So here we are. And this week I’ve been thinking about evil. Evil, and its relationship to anger and hatred and opinion. Because evil is a funny thing, right? I see a lot of things going on in the world that I think are evil. I get angry. I feel hatred. And I have friends who look at the same things I see and they’re fine with it. The things they see as evil seem ridiculous to me. Each person seems to have a moral compass, but it’s almost like all of us have a different spot that is true north. And it’s not just each person, either. It’s communities and states and countries as well. We can’t even agree on things like rape, torture and murder. In general we agree people who commit those crimes should be punished, but – we don’t always agree on what is and/or isn’t a justifiable act and/or punishment for said act, if any. So, what then is evil? Evil can’t enter your heart without your permission, so you can’t see it as evil upfront. It has to enter through anger and hatred so it feels justified. When it comes to humans – we justify inhumane acts when we see others as something less than human. For whatever reason it is… he stole your girlfriend, she’s the wrong color or the wrong gender, they’re the wrong religion or the wrong nationality… I remember seeing people dragging dead bodies through the streets in celebration after armed conflicts in the past. That seems pretty evil to me, but to those who did the dragging – they saw the person they were dragging as the evil one. The only answer here is to be very careful when it comes to anger and hatred. Because evil knows if it can capture your heart it has won the battle. I’m not saying we shouldn’t fight for the things we believe in. We should. We should all work to make our families, our communities, our countries and our world a better place. It’s super hard to do with all the emotions we’re dealing with right now. It’s easy to point our fingers and hate and blame others. We are all evil at the end of someone else’s finger, though. I can only hope that a greater percentage of the world understands we need to get along despite our differences if we want a world at all, rather than the other way around. Center your soul every day. Never lose touch with love. Be the change you want to see. Whatever we put out comes back to us. Cosmic Karma needs to be taken seriously.
