I try to sit and watch a movie about the trafficking of women in Eastern Europe but I can’t settle. The screening of Sex Traffic on C4 coincides with threads in the forum spewing forth hate and misogynistic rants and my mind flits back and forth. As I observe the violent scenes I mentally scroll through the forum and watch as the one who rants in turn becomes the target of yet more hate.

I witness two small eddies in the cycle abuse and hatred that makes the world go round in a downward spiral of death and despair. People like Saddam Hussein are held up as examples of people we should hate with self-righteous impunity because they ’deserve’ it. A trafficked woman is told that to disobey - to refuse to be raped - is to risk her infant son’s life. A poster advocates the extermination of people living with HIV and he is told in a thinly veiled wish that Karma would dictate his own infection. Women are traded like cattle against their will for the gratification of men who will turn around and call them dirty whores to hide their own shame.

All this and more goes through my head as I watch what I can bear of the film. Only a few hours earlier I was thinking how there were very few truly evil people in the world and now on a television screen in my own home I witness unspeakable evil happening to young women.

I search my heart. What do the men who perpetrate such evil deserve? Or to “morph the concept” what should happen to these men that shouldn’t surprise them? What shouldn’t surprise men who spread hatred on the internet? I don’t have the answer, but I do know that I wish them no evil. Two evils don’t make a redemption.

I find I am angry, but I cannot bring myself to hate. This is not altruism, this is self-preservation. Hate is a virus I can’t afford to harbour. I already have a deadly virus eating away at my body; I don’t want another eating away at my soul. I might not be able to control what happens to my body, but I can choose to love or to hate. Love nourishes my soul and so that is what I choose.

Mahatma Ghandi encouraged us to be the change we wish to see in the world. It is a tall order, one that is harder to live by than it might seem at first glance - and believe it or not but the most difficult thing is the fact that real change moves at a glacial pace. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. If I choose to hate because everyone says that in certain circumstances it is just and right to do so, all I am doing is making more eddies in the cycle of abuse. If I choose to hate when I know how self-destructive it is, then all I am doing is spiralling out of control to my death. I choose life. I choose love. I choose to be the change... even though I may not witness real change in my lifetime.

If we were all to choose to be the change, then perhaps together we could stop two epidemics with one pure spirit. Now. In our lifetime.

Be the change... I’m doing my best. If I fall through my own folly or if I am pushed, I get up and love again. I want to live, so I have no other logical choice.