The Line Dividing Good and Evil

I have posted the following on a public forum, and am hopeful it will generate responses. As they come, I will repost some of them in the comments section - anonymously, of course. It's a bit crude for my liking, but I didn't want to spend all night sitting here, trying to formulate the perfect piece of prose. - G.

"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being... During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes, it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil." - Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

I have seen God and the Devil in just about every person here, myself included. Perhaps there are certain persons here you may perceive as knowledgeable, or ignorant, or saintly, or just plain scum. I am inclined to believe that, deep down, despite the facades we project, we are all saints, each one of us. There are some of us who hope to change the status quo and thus bring an end to the suffering of the many at the hands of the few, and there are some of us who celebrate the status quo because there is nothing wrong with it. Oftentimes, we lash out at one another in an effort to make ourselves appear the wiser.

I believe even the most self-absorbed, jingoistic individual can one day see the light, and not one of us should rest until we see this day. We are more than Christians, Jews or Muslims; Canadians, Americans, Arabs or Chinese; old and young; women and men: we are all in this together, and it's high time we started behaving as such. The barriers we build between one another only seek to serve the interests of those who currently rule over us. They want to see us take sides and attack one another. They want to see us live in fear of one another, sister against sister, brother against brother, and will go to great lengths to perpetuate this. Before directing our anger towards these powers, we must realize they, too, are slaves; slaves to the power they wield, living each day fearing who might snatch it from their hands.

I apologize if I sound grandiose - this isn't meant as a sermon from atop my soapbox. I write this because, every time I peruse this forum, I see the same shit over and over: lines being drawn in the sand, insults hurled to and fro, and so on. I believe we are all better than this. Sure, we will have our differences - after all, we each view the world differently, and, as such, will come into conflict now and then - but our attempts to defeat our opponents do nothing to resolve these differences; they merely demonstrate which one of us is more capable of brutality. What do these fights of ours do, except spawn more fighting? What has war done for us, except beget more war?

I await any and all flaming. Feel free to attack my position, even my person, though any attempt at the latter will only serve to reinforce the former.

Your thoughts?