THE EDITOR: Like COVID-19, evil is sometimes spread from person to person. Abused children are a particularly excruciating case in point.

The suffering they endure often manifests itself in the issues they carry into their adulthood, and unfortunately, they might find themselves visiting the tragic results of their pain upon their own children, among others.

Even when adults hurt other adults, evil is multiplied exponentially in the retaliation cascading down the line from one victim to the other, to the other, ad infinitum. Hence gang wars have the potential to swallow up whole communities.

The only way we can put a stop to the spread of evil is if we determine that we will be its final port of call. It will not spread any further from us. We will stand and defeat it here. Many families do this.

They decide that no matter how many generations of alcoholism, spousal abuse, incest, or whatever have existed up to this point in their lives, that evil will not pass on from them. Thus, they will do all that it takes, through the grace of God, to keep alcohol in its place, to never hit a spouse, to never harm a child, in the families that they create.

In the communities that we create, there is only one way to inoculate against the spread of gang violence, and that is through refusing to retaliate extra-judicially against perpetrators. Evil has to stop with us.

When an innocent 11-year-old is killed, what does killing five innocent 40-something-year-olds do, except multiply evil and please the devil?

We are all going to have to say, like the brother of the Harpe Place policeman who was killed: No revenge killings for my brother, for my child, for my man, for whoever. Let the spread of evil stop with me!

JOANNE K JOSEPH

San Fernando

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