Close Enough To Smell The Evil

/ Laura Grace Weldon
“Lucifer” by Franz Stuck

I had a brush with evil when I was 13. Newly 13. A still playing with stuffed animals 13.

The shape this evil took was the grinning faux-benign variety which hid malicious intent. I didn’t realize the danger until too late. I was small and it had all the power vested in a well-liked man.

I didn’t tell anyone, in part to spare my family the (perceived) shame, in part because I thought I was sparing his family, but mostly because I couldn’t bear to think about let alone talk about what happened. Already an anxious child, my mind turned every more relentlessly to understanding why people were cruel.  

It was an ongoing concern. Years earlier I’d asked too many questions about pictures I saw in news magazines. Why troops bombed villages, why pollution was dumped into rivers, why anyone, anywhere, was starving. My parents, realizing there were truly no good answers to repeated “but why” questions, cancelled the magazines.

The year I turned 13 read Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night. His account of surviving the Holocaust gave me a glimpse of how vast evil could be. I embarked on a decades-long quest to understand what caused this largest of evils. I read every Holocaust memoir in the library, initially thinking this had been the only genocide, until I stumbled on other examples in history. Pogroms and holy wars and witch hunts and enslavement and horrors imposed by colonizers. It wasn’t all in the distant past. I read about genocides of the Herero people, the Armenians, the Ukrainians, the Chinese. This led me to horrors still being visited upon people, including by the US. Every book broke me a little bit more on my path from Wiesel’s book to Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee.

I gradually recharted the quest, seeking to answer for myself why people were kind. I tried to do what good I could as well, but it never felt like enough. It still doesn’t.   

I’m seeing what I’d describe as evil going on now. The heedless destruction of the very planet that sustains life in order to continue extracting every ounce of profit. The beyond-devastating mayhem and death in Palestine, funded largely by US tax dollars (whose country our current president says he wants to “own“). Empathy mocked as “woke” while measures taken to ensure inclusion and equality are discarded. The people (elected and unelected) currently in US government who are overtly doing everything possible to undermine democracy itself.

But “evil” isn’t a word that helps us understand why.

We humans have been on this planet such a short time, something like 50,000 years (although new evidence shows it may be much longer). We only developed written language around five thousands years ago. Modern capitalism and its attendant ills only emerged in the nineteenth century. Biologically and emotionally, we are still hunter-gatherers. We evolved to be a compassionate and collaborative species. We are still learning how to live in populous cities rather than nomadic tribes of around 60 people. Our technological advancements and our weapons have developed far more quickly than our ethics around their use. We have yet to grasp just how dangerous rigid economic and political systems can be, particularly when war, crisis, and division benefit the powerful.

Currently we live in a system that thrives on fostering divisions — divisions between our daily lives and nature, between our morals and actions, between our minds and bodies, between haves and have-nots, between any perceived differences from one person to another. The result is individuals likely more disconnected than in any time in history, with fragments of authentic community between us, making us much more in need of products to fill that emptiness and work hours to afford those products — good for capitalism, bad for us and the planet.    

We ignore the separations between us at our peril. Perhaps even more dangerously, we ignore what is separate within us. Denying the fullness of who we are doesn’t allow us to be whole. When we acknowledge that each of us has the capacity for evil as well as good, for greed as well as generosity, for lies as well as truth—then we can see ourselves and each other more clearly. There’s less need to fall back on blame or fear. We can awaken to the boundless energy in real choices to tell the truth, to act with kindness, to do what’s best for us as a community of beings.

I’m not losing hope. There’s humanity even in the people committing evil. I’m not deluded enough to believe that my phone calls and letters and protests will change things, but I will keep on trying. And I will keep trying to understand all the whys I can. That’s the good I can do right now.

“If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? ” ~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

26 thoughts on “Close Enough To Smell The Evil”

  1. First, there is archaeological evidence that homo sapiens have been around as a species for about three hundred to three hundred and fifty thousand years based on evidence uncovered in Morocco.

    Second, to rely on any system of governance to enact change is an exercise in futility insofar as I can see, never mind relying on them as the largest polluters and purveyors of wars to stop the natural and cyclical change of the climate when they cannot even fix potholes, end homelessness, or ensure societal stability.

    Third, like you, I retain hope, but the hope must come from the people and the private sector.

    If in fact you are interested, I am still trying to put together a team, but despite having had three grants approved, the largess and grandiosity of my vision have scared off all the “experts” to date. I would love to find people like you on this perhaps never-ending battle to turn the tide against the evil in the world and make it a truly better place for posterity.

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      1. I’d read that research about the findings in Morocco but forgot to update my notes. Have updated the post with your help. Thank you.
      2. I don’t believe I espoused government as the solution, but change instituted by government regulations (such as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act) have made a profound difference. The largest polluters are corporations, with 100 companies responsible for 70 percent of global emissions. The military is often uncounted in these analyses, but the military is driven (and wars are waged) thanks to intense lobbying, vast campaign contributions, and other efforts by the military-industrial complex. Corporations, overall, pressure the US government for “austerity” measures to cut programs that help people/fix infrastructure while sharply reducing taxes and otherwise steering more money to corporations. And no, the overwhelming evidence does not show, as you assert, that we’re enduring “natural and cyclical change of the climate.”

        3. This is man made.

      3. Hope, for me, does come from the people and the natural world we inhabit. I do not elevate the private sector to this lofty position. If we did what was best for the private sector we’d still have enslaved workers, sweatshops, and child labor. (Well, some on the far right are doing their best to bring back child labor.)

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      • I do not believe you advocated for government intervention directly, no, though far too many people do.

        In terms of the private sector, yeah, I would largely agree, but it would be easier to take over or at least legally invade the private sector than it would be to attempt any enforced change to duly elected governments.

        The structure I set up is actually quite common, though not often mentioned or utilized. The Not-For-Profit owns commercial ventures. In the US this is done through UBIT or Unrelated Business Income Tax, and many religious organizations and Not-For-Profits utilize this to fatten their own coffers.

        In the Philippines where I am working, seventy percent of all proceeds must, by law, be reintroduced into humanitarian and/or environmental and/or infrastructure programs for the benefit of the people. I do not know that the big organizations or NGOs do so, but we have it set up so there would be accountability.

        That being said, if you know anyone semi-retired or otherwise independent, I would love to discuss putting together a team to implement actual change.

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  3. Thanks for your words, Laura. I love your eclectic mix of poetry, levity, and intellectual curiosity. We are in a dangerous time but we must never lose hope. Big hugs.

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    • I tried to be less eclectic when the publisher of my first book insisted I create an author site. I behaved myself for a year or two by writing about the book’s topic, free range learning. But I drift all over the place and enjoy the drifting. There’s so much more weirdness I don’t write about!

      Hugs back to you.

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  4. I also, twice, had that kind of evil experience from well-like and totally trusted men. Young boys with distant fathers are easy targets for playground directors and family friends. I was too young, and there no information in the culture, about this kind of evil to provoke a confrontation, so I shamefully parked it inside. I now have no tolerance for like-minded men and continue to be shocked by their pervasive presence in all sorts of groups. I would not treat them. I forgave myself and gave myself the love and reassurance no adults would provide. I am sorry you had to go through your variety as well.

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    • I’m sorry you endured this abuse, dear friend. I wonder if these sufferings helped steer you to the helping professions of therapist and minister, and onward to mysticism. Sometimes the stones hurled at us help to line the path forward.

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  5. You touched on so much – and as always your gift of words and ability to articulate what so many of us feel but can’t put together in concrete terms is a comfort in and of itself. I hope for yourself it is cathartic, and hence a source of healing.
    I, too, refuse to give up hope. It is not an option. It is one thing I have 100% control of and will not relinquish…but I gladly pass on that hope to all who need the flame rekindled.

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  7. I’m not going to repeat the comment I previously wrote. It was gut wrenching to write the first time around. It was heartfelt and supportive of what you wrote, Laura. But it mentioned some events that happened in the 1940s and the places where they happened. Maybe that’s why it wouldn’t allow me to post. Interesting.

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  8. In the midst of despair, there is a spark of hope if we just look for it. Even in the midst of our own despair as I grapple internally with the chaos around me. I was a bit older when I first read Night but Wiesel’s Night, but it was a book that changed me forever and it opened a door for me… don’t avoid the hard things… putting one’s head in the proverbial sand does not make things go away or make them better. Not easy, especially when Burns words of “mans inhumanity to man” are all around us. And yet… men like Jimmy Carter walked this earth… a person who was not perfect, but he lived the motto: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” And so yes, I am calling, even though I don’t believe my calls alone will change things. But I have hope that with enough calls… something will change. (And there are lots of “me’s” calling… the switchboards at the capitol are inundated! Go US!) Will any of this make it better? Likely not… but giving up is not an option… nor is being silent (yes, keep making those calls!) I am a Rilke devotee and I keep circling back to his “live the question” thoughts… yes, there is a great deal of uncertainty right now… and so many questions but “perhaps [we] will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

    Thank you so much for this most thoughtful and uplifting post. I appreciate it and you!

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    • Hope (and resistance) is all we’ve got.

      There’s an old story floating around the nonviolence community about the effect of public opinion on lawmakers. Back in the mid-1950s, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, learning of famine in the Chinese mainland, launched a ‘Feed Thine Enemy’ campaign. Members and friends (and eventually other denominations) mailed thousands of little bags of rice to the White House with a tag quote in the Bible, ‘If thine enemy hunger, feed him.’ As far as anyone knew for more than ten years, the campaign was an abject failure. The president did not acknowledge receipt of the bags publicly and no food aid was sent to China.

      What activists only learned a decade later was that the campaign played a determining role in preventing nuclear war. Twice while the campaign was on, President Eisenhower met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to consider U.S. options in the conflict with China over two islands, Quemoy and Matsu. The generals twice recommended the use of nuclear weapons. President Eisenhower each time turned to his aide and asked how many little bags of rice had come in. When told they numbered in the tens of thousands, Eisenhower told the generals that as long as so many Americans were expressing active interest in having the U.S. feed the Chinese, he certainly wasn’t going to consider using nuclear weapons against them.

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  11. Thank you Laura. And I’m so sorry any child or person has their beautiful right to innocence and safety broken by another person.

    On kindness. I have learned to see the person. Not to be afraid to acknowledge someone because they are different from me. I’m different too.

    I’m with you, Laura, keep putting the letters and calls in. And I’m with you, Mick, keep painting and writing and planting trees and giving away home grown vegies.

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