Lent Photo a Day: Evil

I remember my parents and grandparents complaining that they hated to listen to the news--the endless litany of crime and disaster made them feel that the world was getting worse every day. I always thought they were being ridiculous. Of course the world wasn't getting worse--we were just forced into awareness of the evil that had always been happening outside of our own small hometowns.

I'm starting to understand what they meant. Maybe it's just that I've reached the same age that they were when they were depressed by the news, but lately I've started to feel like the world is getting worse and worse. Election years are always filled with ugliness, but this time there's so much hatred and name-calling and attacks, not just between candidates, but directed at whole classes and groups of people. Hatred is the heart of evil, and I feel that while there may not be more hatred in people's hearts than in the past, it's become more acceptable to spew it openly, especially on social media. Haters gonna hate, as folks like to say, but they used to have to hide it better. Now haters feel they can spew it in our faces and we have no right to object.

This headline about the growth of hate groups in the United States didn't surprise me, but it saddened me. Evil is growing bolder, and that's not a positive trend. We need to fight it with the only weapon that works against evil: love.