03/30/2025
Everywhere I Look, Evil Is Winning
This is not a pep talk.
I’m not here to offer silver linings or hope wrapped in platitudes. I’m saying this out loud because if I don’t, I will choke on the silence.
Everywhere I look, evil is winning.
That is not metaphor. Not exaggeration. It is the quiet scream lodged in my chest. I write it because the act of naming still matters—perhaps most when it feels like no one is listening.
This isn’t just a bad news cycle or a season of hard times. It is something deeper, more corrosive. It is structural. It is intentional. It is rehearsed and refined and executed with a precision that dares you to call it what it is: evil.
We are living in the mouth of something monstrous.
I’ve stopped asking, “How did we get here?”
We are here.
The doors that should have stayed shut have been kicked wide open. What once was unthinkable is now law. What once was unlawful is now standard. What once was fringe is now the center of power.
Judges are mocked. Scientists silenced. Protesters detained. Institutions, gutted. Children watch as truth is twisted into spectacle. Books disappear. Facts are drowned beneath floods of falsehood. Grief doesn’t even have time to finish its sentence before the next horror begins.
This is not fiction. This is not satire. This is the news.
I am not writing to be brave. I do not feel brave. I feel cracked. Thin. Hollowed out by the endless churn of cruelty that no longer even bothers to mask itself. I feel like I am watching something sacred die—publicly, slowly, to the sound of applause.
Toni Morrison wrote: “The function of freedom is to free someone else.” But what happens when even the language of freedom is under siege? When speech is punished, when history is redacted, when memory itself is suspect?
This is not a call to action. Not today.
This is not hope dressed in fine clothes.
This is not a balm, or a banner.
This is just the truth.
I am tired.
I am afraid.
I am angry.
I am not okay.
And I know I am not alone.
If you are grieving, you are not weak.
If you are angry, you are not bitter.
If you are terrified, you are not paranoid.
If you are numb, that too is a kind of knowing.
Survival is not small. To still feel in the face of all this is its own defiance.
To speak plainly. To name the harm. To bear witness when lies are cheap and truth is costly—that is the work. That is the record.
Everywhere I look, evil is winning.
But I write this so that it is written:
We saw it.
We said it.
We did not look away.
And maybe—just maybe—that will mean something later.
