I have been thinking about good and evil. The question you pose is how did evil first come into existence if people are born good as I say.

I might have to look again at the words good and evil. I think a better way to think about it is hurt and healed.

Part of the process of living life is to become hurt and then heal from that hurt. I would not want to go through life without ever being hurt. That is part of life. When a child learns to walk or sleep on their own it involves a lot of hurt and crying.

We have a process for healing from hurt, which is to cry, shake, laugh, tell stories, and receive physical touch. We do this healing best in the presence of focused attention and love. That healing allows us to grow from our hurts and experiences. When we are healed from our hurts we can think flexibly and not react in a patterned way.

At the individual level what we call evil can come when the healing process is interrupted. In the absence of healing people get stuck in a reactive state that doesn’t seem rational. Evil to me is irrational and harmful action.

On the societal level when consistent hurts hit a specific group of people in the same way then we see the same sorts of reactive patterns across the whole group. This is especially true when specific oppressions targets the healing process. An example is to say that boys don’t cry or girls can’t show anger.

To me oppression grows when individual and collective hurts are not healed. This leads people to act irrationally and sometimes groups of people act irrationally in similar ways because of similar hurts.

So yes it may look like evil but to me every person has the capacity to heal and be part of healing others through focused attention and love. Of course I think some people are pretty far along on irrational and harmful behavior and they just need to be stopped. But once they are no longer a danger to others, I think they can be brought back into community. I believe in restorative and transformative justice in the classroom and beyond. There are no evil children.

I want to say that the vocabulary of hurt and healing is inadequate. It makes it seem like there is some way that hurt people are “broken” and they need to be repaired. No one is broken. We are all whole and in process and fully intelligent and capable. We may not have access to all that flexible thinking in every moment, but in each moment we are making the best decisions we can.

When I look at James’ characters I see a world of hurt for everyone and not much healing happening. It is no surprise that people make irrational and harmful decisions.

From any perspective killing children might seem evil. But to me as a reader it is an understandable reaction to the hurts.

I think Lilith was wary of trusting Homer because she was stuck in irrational thought about her children.

In fact no one could trust anyone. It was a nightmare. Throughout it all we could see Lilith continually fighting and thinking. I have no doubt of her goodness.

Anyway… probably more words that I originally meant to write but I don’t believe in fighting against evil but rather against oppression and the irrational thinking behind it. My sustained belief in the basic goodness of people allows me to continue that fight.