Miguel Fernando was destined to become the greatest left handed baseball pitcher in history but when he was three he got into his dad’s gardening tools and cut off a good portion of his index finger. Of course, no human being knew this and it was really the fault of Heathrow, his guardian angel who was distracted by a random bolt from an electrical storm on Venus.
Surprisingly, crap like this happened all the time on the supernatural plain where human life was considered invaluable but earthy goals were regarded mostly as a joke. The truth was that human beings didn’t live long to accomplish much of anything significant except make the One Choice that really mattered and that was, of course, Good or Evil. Equally surprising was that choice ratio was about 50/50. Of course, most of the humans who chose Evil really didn’t see it that way. They viewed it as getting their way, not giving in or even fulfilling their Divine Destiny. That’s really what Evil is when you get down to it – choosing self to the ultimate degree.
I know what you’re thinking – the Hitler question, i.e., “what about Hitler?” Human beings always bring that up. Hitler didn’t choose Evil over good until way late in the game, by which time he really didn’t have a lot of choices anyway. Through his life he just chose himself over others. It started out as a determination not to be taken advantage of by people who had power over him and then somewhere it got into not caring what happened to those who stood in his way and then it became killing them off. By the time he was invading Poland and executing Jews he had long given up the power of choice. That’s also how Evil works. If you choose it enough, over and over long enough, you stop getting a choice at all. You can call it Possession if you want but it’s really just an extension of putting yourself first all the time, every time. And no, it doesn’t work the same way if you keep choosing Good or the good of others over yourself. You can always stop choosing Good if you want, but the really Good people rarely change sides. It may take a lot longer for Good to payoff for an individual, but once it does, the feeling is so solid, so real, that it locks in.
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