“The world is a cancer, and my soul is the knife with which I will cut it out.”

The Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller

I read the news and I want to cry. So much pain, suffering, anger, and angst consume our world. Yet, amidst it all, there is still so much beauty.

I cannot deny the pain and suffering any more than I can deny the profound beauty of this world—its people, animals, and natural wonders. All of it, beautiful. All of it, capable of profound kindness or deliberate cruelty, thoughtful connection or careless disregard, collaboration or obstruction, honesty or deceit. We are capable of all of it. We hold the power to choose: will we align ourselves with Love or with Evil?

Years ago, I met a man who dismissed my belief in the inherent goodness of humanity as a weakness. “You are so naive to believe evil does not exist,” he scoffed. I countered, affirming that I knew evil existed, but believed Love was greater and would ultimately prevail, cutting it out. He then spent nearly five years proving me wrong. By the end of that relationship, I doubted the very existence of love, but I knew the presence of evil intimately.

When he was arrested and I miraculously got my life back, I chose to heal the massive wounds I’d experienced with Love. It was the only force strong enough to save me from despair. Since those days of post-traumatic love—which was, in truth, abuse—I had relaxed my guard against evil. I chose instead to believe that if I simply stayed the course of Love, evil would not prevail.

I’ve had a rude awakening. Evil is afoot. It flexes its muscles across the globe, beguiling those who underestimate its power. It masquerades as benevolence, as all-knowing wisdom, as pure justice—the rightful avenger of wrongs spanning decades, even centuries. It promises to right the ship, but only if we, its unwitting acolytes, remain silent, immobile, complacent, and complicit in its insistent claim that it is the sole path to our salvation.

There is no salvation in following evil. There is no Hail Mary that will rescue humankind from its voracious jaws. Evil wants only to consume goodness, to devour love and corrupt its delicate essence into the fires of hell. It seeks to make humanity bow at its altar and sacrifice all that is good, kind, beautiful, and humane about our shared human condition.

I cannot bow. I must wake up. Awakened, I cannot stay silent. I cannot allow my angst, my heartache, my despair to silence the one thing I know is greater than evil: Love.

And so I stand strong of back, soft of heart, and call out to all good people to drop their guard and give in to that which is our salvation. Our humanity.