Where Is Evil?
By Pat Harman
A consumer eats a producer.
A predator eats a consumer.
The predator dies, and is eaten by decomposers.
From the decomposers, a new producer grows.
Another consumer eats the new producer.
Where is evil in this cycle?
Is it in the loam?
The thick black loam that consumes all things.
In the ground, the thick blackness fills our mouths,
Suffocating and choking out our breath.
But no, the loam is not evil. It does not want or think, it consumes.
Is the cycle itself evil?
Do we punish life for being life?
Our nature is to live, to survive, and to enjoy.
The world will take all this from us.
Families perish, species are exterminated, and our joy ripped away.
All by the hand of a green world. A beautiful, bloody flower.
Why does it do this?
Ever-changing, but with no meaningful change?
Ashes to ashes.
From dust we came.
To dust we return.
The order of all life.
Giving us this life can not be evil, so where does it arise?
Can it come from the testosterone of man?
War and fighting to prove who is the well-endowed.
Games proving to each other that one is more man.
Culture of man arises from bastardization of this.
But malice is not the source of evil.
So is it the greed?
Does evil, and thus the testosterone-fueled wars, arise from greed?
Man over man over man over man.
Hierarchy. Meritocracy. Feudalism. Genocide.
Evolving and growing and becoming.
Imperialism. Capital gain. Colonialism.
Is this the destruction of the earth?
Can a thing so evil even be evil?
The nature of cancer is to grow.
Grow and expand and consume and evolve,
That is the single directive of the thing.
It has no choice in the matter.
But is this thing evil?
What of those who serve it?
Nature of nature is to create evil.
Nature of humanity is to love.
Reply and react. Do something. Become more.
Create all from chaos and evil.
Nature leans not toward order.
Nature leans not toward tradition.
Nature leans toward nature.
Live and love and laugh and lie dead in the loam.
Someday.