Thomas Merton wrote that Hell is where no one has anything in common with anyone else except for the fact that they all hate one another and cannot get away from one another and from themselves. He wrote this decades ago. It could have been written today.

I write this because I had a brush with what felt like Hell this morning when I turned on the news on my computer to try and understand the cruelty and hatred I was finding in my country.

It was bad timing, really, for me,  the child and grandchild of grateful immigrants to America who almost surely saved my life. They never said one bad word about America or any of its citizens. They never stole a thing. They were not “the worst of the worsts.”

I was horrified, like so many others.

The refugees I grew up with only spoke of gratitude: “We prayed for years to get to America.” Grandma Cohen walked across Europe to get here.

What I was watching was a video of huge and mostly overweight men in combat jackets and bullet and gas belts wearing masks from a horror movie – the images I’ve seen of Frankenstein were less ugly and disturbing. As a reporter who often covered the police – many became friends – I had to wonder what the point was of dressing these creepily looking monsters up as warriors and pretending they were protectors of the people and patriots for the country – including me.

There is no way they have made my life safer.

It sickens me to think the very people who swear to protect the government, and us, wisely and fairly cheer this cruelty and pay for lots more without hesitation. It’s not about politics; it’s about morality, kindness and decency. Cruelty is an old playbook.

This is naive, of course; I think we all know what the combat war suits were meant to do. The idea, successfully and instantly, was to frighten all of the people who saw it, the helpless targets of this very fascist like and pointedly un-American-like justice.

The toughest police in the most dangerous places in America – I covered them – do not need to hide their identities from the people they pursue and arrest.

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God help these masked men. They are victims too. Imagine what will be said of them in the future.

A friend messaged me; he is deeply religious, and he said without hesitation that what I was seeing in the news and online was clearly the work of the devil. I can’t say I believe in the devil, but I do believe in evil, and it feels like that is something I am seeing when I watch this endless video of cruelty and violence.

My friend said the devil makes many disciples by preaching against others’ sins. He convinces his followers of the great evil of sin, induces a crisis of guilt and anger by which “God is honored and satisfied.” After that, said my friend, he lets them spend the rest of their lives meditating on the evil doings of other men, never on their own.

It did feel like a devil was filming the cruelty and also creating it.

Looking online, I saw one theologian talk about the theology of the devil, which starts with the principle “Pleasure is sin,” and then turns it on its head: “All sin is pleasure.” I’m thinking about it. There is something to it.

We were lied to, of course, and assured that the executors of these awful and frightening pursuits and arrests were heroes, seeking to rid the nation of “the worst of the worst,” only to find out they were ordinary,  hard working people just like my grandmother and grandfather who had made their way to America to live safely and peacefully and work hard to give better lives to their childlren than they ever had.

I think often of Hanna Arendt, the brilliant refugee who fled Germany for the United States before the war and wrote eloquently about the refugee experience. She described refugees as losing everything that grounded their humanity: their homes, the familiarity of daily life, their sense of purpose, their native language, and the naturalness of expressing feelings.

Arendt argued that the worst persecutors of refugees were not evil; they were ordinary people just taking orders.

I was fortunate to take one of her classes at the New School in New York City. I tried this morning to imagine my feelings if my grandmother or grandfather, two gentle and loving people, were hauled off in front of me by thugs in masks or even shot by mistake and killed as they fled men in cars pursuing them in front of their children or in school and neighbors screamed for help.

Could this really be my country?

That’s when I started to cry; I felt hopeless and betrayed. I was in a new kind of Hell, one without fire and flames, but hell nonetheless. I wondered if there was something wrong with me, for feeling so strongly about such a vile and cruel thing.

It is not the America my grandmother risked her life to come to tomorrow; it is not the America I have been so proud of. What am I seeing?

I don’t want to live in a place where I cry and vomit watching this cruelty, and yes, I’ll say evil. I’m not hungry today.

Hate is not the answer. We need an army of good.

We do not go into the desert to escape people we fear, but to learn how to find them. We do not leave them to have nothing more to do with them. We learn to find out the way to do them the most good.

It is in this loneliness that the deepest healing begins for me. This is what Contemplation is for.

It is there that I discover action without motion, vision in obscurity, and above all, desire and a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity. I have faith we will get our country back.

I stopped crying and went to work.

Good is my medicine and my salvation.