What’re you gonna do when Dracula comes for you?

I don’t usually write much about current events. It isn’t that I ignore them, or feel like they’ll bring down my vibe, or think I’m somehow above them — it’s mostly because I don’t think that anyone really needs or wants to hear about them from yet another random blogger. If I lack the experience and language to engage with something on more than a surface level, if I’m going through the same learning process as most everyone else, then there’s no real reason for me to give my two cents, you know?

Every once in a while, though, the news hits different.

By now, you’ve probably heard about the destruction of Lahaina, Hawaii. Depending on your personal social media ecosystem, you may have heard this blamed on Reptilians, energy weapons, and astrological occurrences. The thing that really got me, though, was an image of a “demonic face” in the flames.

It got me, because I remember seeing pretty much the same picture long ago. Only it wasn’t Hawaii, and it wasn’t an entire town — just two buildings. A devil’s face in the smoke billowing from the World Trade Center. A Rorshach’s test for the afraid.
“Look at that! A demon face!”
How easy is it for someone to dehumanize an enemy when they have a sign — however pareidolic, however blurry — that their enemies are in league with the forces of ultimate evil?

History may not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes.

I remember another photo. Then-President Bush as he was delivered a folder of important documents, quietly setting them aside. That folder probably didn’t contain any information that could’ve stopped 9/11, but it was no less damning. The CIA had warned his administration months before, and nothing was done.

Sometimes, evil lives in mundane things.

Mundane things, like golf courses and farm land. When Hawaii was taken and sown with sugar cane and pineapples, its water was diverted from wetlands to farmland. When resorts and golf courses came, so was more water diverted. Monoculture brought with it invasive grasses, ill-adapted to Hawaii’s water cycle. Without wetlands, packed now with tinder, Hawaii gave all of the warning signs of a devastating fire. And nothing was done.

Evil lives in a jar of dirt, waiting for analysis. “Handle it with extra care,” they told me, “it’s evidence in litigation.” Evil lives in a board room where it’s debated whether or not it’s cheaper to remediate the soil, or just paying off the people who get sick from it.

It’s easy to point the finger at some kind of Evil Other. Dogmatic religions have been doing it for millennia in the form of devils and heathens. Cults do it by isolating members from non-members. The New Age movement does it by calling its devotees enlightened and high-vibrational and pointing the finger at the “unenlightened” and “low-vibrational.” Some just straight-up blame aliens.

It’s easy to do this, because we will never consider ourselves part of this Evil Other. If we aren’t part of the Evil Other, then we can’t have caused bad things, because it’s common knowledge that the Evil Other is responsible. It’s a tautology that saves us from examining our own mundane habits, and the way that they shape the world.

It’s also easy to blame an Evil Other, because cults, enlightenment, or orthorexia (or whatever your dogma of choice may be) always have a baked-in means of spiritual bypassing. Have the right beliefs, eat the right foods, be born the right way, wear the right things, buy the right stuff, and it will outweigh whatever mundane evil you might contribute to.

But it doesn’t really, does it?

Capitalism came to Hawaii, stripped it of its water, stripped its people of the ability to steward the land, and let it burn for the sake of the money it could get for sugar, pineapples, and vacations.

How many of the same people selling spiritual advice, Starseed activations, and life-coaching courses are willing to blame the Evil Other instead? How many more people are willing to try to extract money from the land even while it burns?

Reptilians, space lasers, and demons didn’t do this. (The photo of an “energy weapon” is a long exposure shot of a launch from years ago. It’s not the only one.) Greed did. The thirst for gold at any cost did. The Evil Other isn’t an alien or supernatural force, it’s us. Every time we engage in spiritual bypassing, every time we point the finger and blame the Other, it’s us. It always was.

There’s not a lot of money to be made in saying that capitalism is the problem. At least, not as much as posting about energy weapons and conspiracies (interspersed with the requisite amounts of platitudes, bare skin, and beach photos, as the algorithm demands).

There’s an old saying, “Before Enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment chop wood, carry water,” and I think it fits here. Enlightenment — whatever form that may take for each of us — is within. It doesn’t change how we have to move through and engage with the world. It absolves us of nothing.

But say I’m wrong. Say that it’s all true — the Reptilians, the demons, the space lasers. History has rhymed often enough to show us the tools they use. We should know what unchecked greed looks like, what it does, and how it operates. Why are we willing to use these same tools as long as they’re making us money?

What makes us think that saying the right words, buying the right things, eating the right foods, and thinking the right things make us immune from wrongdoing?

Evil is what evil does. Not what it says, wears, eats, or believes. Would we even recognize it when it stares us in the face?