Chapter 17: Good Vs Evil
As my perspective continued to change, I found myself thinking more about the idea of good and evil.
What did those words actually mean?
I had always understood them in the abstract, but what was happening to my mom made them feel much
more tangible.
Someone had deliberately sought her out, gained her trust, pretended to love her, and used that relationship
to take money from her.
Whoever was behind those accounts may never have seen her face when our family confronted her.
They didn’t see my dad’s anger.
They didn’t see the arguments.
They didn’t see our children caught in the middle of a family falling apart.
They didn’t see any of the consequences unfolding inside our home.
But they knew they were deceiving her.
And they continued.
I struggled to understand how someone could knowingly exploit another human being that way.
To my mind, if evil existed, surely the deliberate exploitation of another person’s vulnerability belonged
somewhere within its definition.
This led me into increasingly spiritual ways of thinking.
I began wondering whether the demons described throughout human history needed to be understood as
literal supernatural creatures at all.
Perhaps “demons” could also describe something within human beings—the capacity to knowingly cause
suffering and continue anyway.
I didn’t know.
I still don’t.
But these were the kinds of questions occupying my mind.
The change in my perspective was not entirely comforting.
In some ways, it made me feel increasingly isolated.
Things that had once interested me began to feel less important.
Conversations about sports, movies, television, celebrities, and other entertainment sometimes irritated me
because I was struggling to understand why we devoted so much attention to things that seemed insignificant
compared with what was happening around us.
At the time, I interpreted this as another part of my “awakening.”
I felt as though I was seeing things I had previously ignored.
I also began finding other people who expressed similar dissatisfaction with materialism, consumer culture,
social media, and the way people seemed increasingly disconnected from one another.
That made me feel less alone.
But looking back, I can also recognize the danger in believing that I had “woken up” while everyone else
remained asleep.
It would have been very easy to turn a realization about humility into another reason to feel superior.
I had already spent enough of my life doing that.
I did not have some hidden knowledge unavailable to everyone else.
I was a man watching his family fall apart, desperately trying to make sense of what was happening.
Spirituality became one of the ways I tried.
One place where I consistently found meaning was in raising my children.
I couldn’t control the scammers.
I couldn’t control my parents.
I couldn’t control the world around me.
But I could influence the kind of father I became.
I could teach my children to care about other people.
I could teach them to treat others with dignity and respect.
And I could try to demonstrate those values through the way I lived.
I didn’t always succeed.
But increasingly, that was the person I wanted to become.
These thoughts were still developing, and they would continue changing over time.
For now, though, I need to return to my parents.
They were finally coming home.