Over the past 3-4 days I have felt this constant presence of the feeling of evil. And what I realize is that what was done to me was very wrong, and that part of me reacted as was inevitable–by internalizing some of that malice–and directing it at myself. I do not treat myself the way I would other people, and never have. I realized that I have always felt like a stranger, and not an important one at that.
I have covered this up, of course, with self importance, continual outrage, prodigious marathons of abstraction, and proactive anger which has likely sometimes extended into bullying.
But what I feel is that there is an evil in this world, and that we need to accept it. We cannot do away with it. It is part and parcel of this place, of this plane of existence. Treating it as exceptional or unusual is to fail to understand how things are and always have been. This does not mean we should not oppose it physically and concretely, but there is a spirit in the air, and it is in all of us. To become fully calm, we have to know and accept that we all have wild beasts within us, and that those who perform acts of evil are not as different from the rest of us as we would like.
And I think if we are honest, most of us do commit small acts of anger, of venom, of dishonest, passive aggression, of disconnection and banishment, etc.
As Christ said: let he who is without sin cast the first stone. So often, I think, we punish others because we are loathe to acknowledge our own short-comings. Judging others is so much easier than judging ourselves, and it is so much more pleasant to direct self loathing into self righteousness, anger, and violence.