The problem of sadness

So to summarize:

When someone appears to be causing unnecessary harm there are two possible responses that I see, anger or sadness.

People turn to anger because they believe in 'evil', where it is defined as knowingly causing unnecessary harm and just not caring. If you believe in such 'evil' then you feel it's no use to try to reason with such people and that leaves only force. We believe in evil and thus feel hate and get angry. It does have a somewhat useful result in that I guess we're better able to potentially apply force.

I've decided though to relabel 'evil' as 'profound stupidity', where the person causing the unnecessary harm is just currently too stupid or ignorant to understand why causing unnecessary harm is a thing to be avoided. And thus trying to keep it somewhere still within the area of reason, and if not very practically really within the realm of reason, the possibility is still there in the long term thus diminishing any potential feelings of anger.

That leaves me with just sadness.

The problem is that what if the person performing the harmful act is doing so exactly because they're think that I'm evil and that they have no choice but to punish me (resort to force). If I show sadness then, I'm only confirming that their actions are having the intended effect.

I think this probably comes down to me trying to rise up above the usual violent (force over reason) way of our society (behind the pretenses) and unfortunately just putting myself in a position where I'll more easily be hurt by others.