And I understand the appetite for it; I felt the pull of it myself, in the worst months.

But revenge and justice are not the same thing, and the difference is the whole of what I learned.

Revenge is hot and personal and bottomless; it wants the other person to suffer, and no amount of their suffering ever fills the hole, because the hole was never really about them.

Justice is cold and structural and finite.

It does not require anyone to suffer for my satisfaction.

It only requires that the truth be established, that the theft be undone, that the people who did it face the lawful consequence of having done it, and that the harm stop.