Sinners, Saints, and Snow

I hate a winter without snow, I say this for two reasons, despite my ideal location in Northern Minnesota, everyone else seems to be having a snow day today, while the ground up here remains barren, with only a few freezer burn scars of the nightly frost to distract from its dull, dead, brown. What I really want is snow to cover the ground and make everything glisten, gleam in shimmering white.
I am reading the book "Blue Like Jazz" by Donald Miller and the author made an observation around the nature of humanity that I struggled with. He was looking at the terrbile things that were happening in the Congo and was asking himself what cause these people to be so evil, to commit such acts. He suggested two ways of looking at things, either we in the United States are more sophisticated than those people and so this is why we are not prone to such acts, or we too are capable of such evil. The first statement would seem to suggest a superiority of race or culture that he did not want to make, so he felt compelled to the second one. Using the example of our driving when a cop is around he said "that the soul of man, unwatched, is perverse."
Another book on my reading pile is "Becoming a Blessed Church" by N. Graham Standish. I do not want to make this into simply a book study but Standish makes another observation that I am still struggling with. Standish writes about the power of the demonic. Without going to much into it, what really struck me was his explanation seemed to make it so at least some of the evil that we do is not our fault but cause by demonic forces.
I do not like either of this options, I think they take away from our free will, something I really believe in. I believe that we have the power to choose for ourselves what we will do. Certainly it is influenced by our upbringing, our situation, and all of these factors, but I believe it is our choice. To chalk it up to the perversity of our souls, or the demonic forces minimizes the evil we do, and I believe conversly diminishes the good as well.
I guess I do not know whether the ground is normally brown and dead, or green and vibrant, but I do know, I want it to snow.