with each passing day, I understand less and less, for
who could ever claim to know it all, yet, the simplicity
of our base-ic basest instincts makes evil so easily attractive,
that now, I forgive almost nothing, anyone for the cruelty
inherent in on the surfacial skin of our normalcy, so easily,
revealed, and reveled in, wrecks me, and the poetry
sparks are not doused, but wick and ember shriveled

oh the irony, that foolish me should write of the
commandment to love just as the world displays
old levels of hate historically deep… .I am hated,
to many who would know me only as Jew,
and this refresher course in my brain, reminds me,
that love thy neighbor as thyself, can morph into a
generational opposite, that my former degree of comfort,
beliefs, was only skin deep…and Tolstoy was a naïf, a romantic,
a royal, who hoped for the best in each man, and that
cannot ne achieved for hate is so easy digestible, so sweet a treat
for humans, who desire no compass other than simple baseness
to know which direction to take….

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”There can be only one permanent revolution—a moral one; the regeneration of the inner man. How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself."

Tolstoy

”To perform evil deeds a person must discover “a justification for his actions,” so that he can regard stealing, humiliating and killing as good. “Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble,” and so conscience restrained him. He had no ideology, Solzhenitsyn observes, nothing like “anti-imperialism” or “decolonization” to allay pangs of guilt. Solzhenitsyn concludes: “Ideology—that is what gives evil-doing its long-sought justification and gives the evil-doer the necessary steadfastness and determination . . . so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but receive praise and honors.”

**Solzhenitsyn