HUMANITY !!! " GIVE ME A BREAK "

HUMANITY

The Extraordinary Irony of Our Own Self-Destruction

We call ourselves intelligent.

We call ourselves civilized.

We call ourselves humane.

Perhaps it is time we looked up the meaning of the words.

There is something almost magnificent about humanity.

Magnificent, that is, in the sheer scale of its contradictions.

We are the species that can split the atom but apparently cannot share a loaf of bread.

We can send machines billions of miles into space, peer backwards through the universe towards the beginning of time, transplant human hearts, decode DNA, communicate instantaneously across continents and build computers capable of processing quantities of information that would once have seemed supernatural.

And yet, after thousands upon thousands of years of what we rather generously call civilization, we still have not mastered the extraordinarily complicated concept of not killing one another.

We build monuments to peace while manufacturing weapons.

We preach compassion while stepping over poverty.

We celebrate freedom while demanding conformity.

We praise honesty while rewarding deception.

We speak reverently about the sanctity of life while continually finding ingenious new ways of destroying it.

Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that we do most of this while remaining absolutely convinced that we are the good people.

Humanity has developed an extraordinary ability to stand in the wreckage of its own decisions, look around indignantly and ask:

“Who did this to us?”

Apparently anyone will do.

The government.

The opposition.

Foreigners.

Immigrants.

The rich.

The poor.

The young.

The old.

Religion.

Atheists.

Capitalism.

Socialism.

Liberals.

Conservatives.

East.

West.

North.

South.

Yesterday’s generation.

Tomorrow’s generation.

God.

The Devil.

Fate.

History.

Bad luck.

Anyone.

Anything.

Just so long as we do not have to look into the mirror.

Because the one suspect humanity seems remarkably reluctant to question is humanity itself.

ARMED TO THE TEETH

Consider our priorities.

Across the world, nations spend staggering resources preparing themselves for the possibility that other nations might attack them.

Of course, those other nations are doing exactly the same thing.

One side builds a weapon because the other side has a weapon.

The other side then builds a larger weapon because the first side built another weapon.

The first side responds by building several more.

Everybody insists they are doing this reluctantly.

Nobody wants war, naturally.

We simply spend enormous amounts of money 

preparing for it.

What an extraordinary arrangement.

Imagine two neighbours behaving this way.

One buys a gun because he suspects the man next door might buy one.

The neighbour sees the gun and buys two.

The first neighbour sees the two guns and purchases a machine gun.

Soon both houses are packed from basement to attic with explosives.

Their children are hungry.

Their roofs leak.

Their elderly parents cannot afford medicine.

The plumbing is broken.

The school down the road is falling apart.

But thank goodness everyone is safe.

Safe from whom?

Each other.

That, apparently, is civilization.

We have armed ourselves to the teeth while millions of human beings still lack the most basic necessities of life.

There is always money somewhere for another missile.

Another bomber.

Another warship.

Another weapons programme.

Another sophisticated method of turning a living human being into a dead one.

But mention providing adequate food, shelter, healthcare, education or dignity for every human being and suddenly humanity becomes very concerned about budgets.

“Who is going to pay for it?”

An excellent question.

Oddly, one heard rather less frequently when discussing instruments of destruction.

We have created weapons capable of annihilating cities in minutes and perhaps civilization itself in hours.

Then we call this security.

Security!

There is surely a cosmic comedian somewhere having difficulty breathing.

We have built enough destructive power to make our own extinction conceivable, pointed much of it at ourselves and declared the arrangement necessary for our survival.

You could not write better satire.

THE GREAT HUMAN LEDGER

Then there is wealth.

Money itself is not evil.

Prosperity is not evil.

Success is not evil.

Ambition is not evil.

There is nothing inherently immoral about creating 

something valuable and benefiting from it.

The obscenity begins when wealth becomes

 more sacred than human life.

We live in a world capable of producing extraordinary abundance, yet people still starve.

Not because humanity does not understand hunger.

Not because we have never seen starvation.

Not because we lack agricultural knowledge.

Not because nobody has invented transportation.

We know.

That is the uncomfortable part.

We know.

We have seen the photographs.

We have watched the reports.

We know children go to sleep hungry.

We know families live without clean water.

We know people die from preventable causes.

We know human beings sleep on streets within walking distance of buildings containing unimaginable wealth.

Somehow we have trained ourselves 

To regard much of this as normal.

That may be one of humanity’s most frightening talents.

Not cruelty itself.

Normalization.

The ability to witness something appalling often enough that eventually we stop seeing it.

A starving child should be a moral emergency.

Instead, too often, the starving child becomes a statistic.

Ten starving children become another statistic.

Ten thousand become a headline.

A million become geopolitics.

Numbers are wonderfully convenient things.

They do not have eyes.

They do not cry.

They do not ask us why.

Meanwhile, enormous fortunes accumulate.

Again, wealth itself is not the crime.

Indifference is.

There comes a point where one must surely ask:

How much is enough?

How many houses can one person inhabit simultaneously?

How many cars can one person drive at once?

How many meals can one stomach consume?

How many zeros must appear on a bank statement before someone finally says:

“That will probably do.”

Humanity has somehow constructed a civilization in which endless accumulation can be considered admirable while inability to survive economically is frequently treated as a personal moral failure.

The person with billions is described as successful.

The person with nothing is asked what they did wrong.

How convenient.

OUR ONE AND ONLY HOME

Then we come to Earth.

Our home.

Not one of our homes.

Not the holiday property.

Not the spare planet we keep tucked away for emergencies.

The only home humanity presently has.

And what do we do with it?

We pollute it.

We poison rivers.

We fill oceans with waste.

We destroy habitats.

We consume resources as though replenishment were somebody else’s administrative problem.

We contaminate air and soil and water, then express astonishment when consequences appear.

Again, the remarkable thing is not merely that we do these things.

It is that 

We know we are doing them.

Ignorance would at least provide an excuse.

Our ancestors could damage environments without understanding complex ecological systems.

We do not possess that luxury.

We have satellites.

Measurements.

Universities.

Scientific institutions.

Decades of accumulated evidence.

We can watch environmental change practically in real time.

Yet still there is that familiar human response:

“Yes, but…”

Ah, yes.

But.

Perhaps the most powerful word in the human language.

“Yes, pollution is terrible, but…”

“Yes, poverty is awful, but…”

“Yes, war is dreadful, but…”

“Yes, children are dying, but…”

“Yes, something should be done, but…”

Humanity has constructed an entire moral escape tunnel from that single word.

We acknowledge the problem and simultaneously excuse ourselves from responsibility for solving it.

Brilliant.

Absolutely brilliant.

THE HUMAN CANNOT FAIL

Here we encounter one of the central problems of our species.

The human cannot fail.

Oh, an individual human being can certainly fail.

Preferably somebody else.

But humanity collectively?

Never.

When things go wrong, we become victims of circumstances mysteriously unrelated to our own behaviour.

We have perfected the arrogance of playing victim while refusing to accept fault.

We want the sympathy of innocence combined with the power of responsibility.

We demand credit for our achievements but reject ownership of our disasters.

When civilization advances:

Look what humanity accomplished!

When civilization collapses:

How could this have happened to us?

We want medals for the cure and plausible deniability for the disease.

This is not merely hypocrisy.

It is something more dangerous.

It prevents learning.

Because improvement requires an extraordinarily simple sentence:

“We were wrong.”

Three words.

Apparently more terrifying than nuclear weapons.

“We were wrong.”

Imagine governments saying it without qualification.

Imagine religious institutions saying it.

Imagine corporations saying it.

Imagine political movements saying it.

Imagine nations saying it.

Imagine families saying it.

Imagine each of us saying it.

Not:

“Mistakes were made.”

What a delicious phrase that is.

Mistakes apparently materialized spontaneously.

Nobody actually made them.

They simply appeared one morning.

Not:

“We regret that people were offended.”

Not:

“Our intentions were good.”

Not:

“You have misunderstood us.”

Not:

“Everybody was doing it.”

Simply:

We were wrong.

And then the truly revolutionary sentence:

“We must change.”

THE NOSE PROBLEM

Humanity possesses extraordinary vision.

Except, apparently, when asked to see beyond the end of its own nose.

We understand immediate gratification beautifully.

Long-term consequences?

Rather less enthusiastically.

We behave like a person sitting in a wooden house during winter who discovers that burning the furniture keeps him warm.

Wonderful!

Burn the chair.

Warmth.

Burn the table.

More warmth.

Burn the cupboards.

Lovely.

Someone points out that eventually there will be no furniture and perhaps no house.

“Stop being negative.”

Human beings are astonishingly skilled at confusing warnings with pessimism.

Tell us what we want to hear and you are inspirational.

Tell us what we need to hear and you are troublesome.

The truth has rarely won popularity contests.

Perhaps because truth has an irritating habit of arriving without flattering us first.

OUR TALENT FOR HARM

Then there is our extraordinary ability to inflict suffering upon our fellow human beings.

This deserves particular attention.

Because we like to think cruelty belongs to monsters.

That is comforting.

Monsters are different from us.

Monsters can be identified.

Monsters look sinister.

Monsters live somewhere else.

History tells us something considerably more disturbing.

Terrible acts are frequently committed by remarkably ordinary people.

People who eat breakfast.

People who love their children.

People who laugh with friends.

People who believe themselves decent.

People who go home after participating in cruelty and sleep perfectly well.

That should frighten us far more than any mythical monster.

Human beings possess an almost limitless ability to divide themselves into us and them.

Once “them” has been established, morality becomes remarkably flexible.

We can inflict upon “them” what we would consider unthinkable if inflicted upon “us.”

Their children become collateral damage.

Their dead become numbers.

Their suffering becomes necessary.

Their grief becomes propaganda.

Our violence is defence.

Their violence is barbarism.

Our dead are martyrs.

Their dead are enemies.

Our cause is justice.

Their cause is hatred.

Round and round the wheel turns.

Generation after generation.

Century after century.

Each group completely certain that this time the hatred is justified.

HISTORY: HUMANITY’S MOST IGNORED TEACHER

We often say that we must learn from history.

It is a lovely expression.

We should perhaps try it sometime.

Human history is essentially an enormous library containing detailed instructions entitled:

THINGS THAT WENT TERRIBLY WRONG — PLEASE DO NOT DO THESE AGAIN.

Humanity walks into the library, glances briefly at the shelves and says:

“Interesting.”

Then does them again.

Empires rise convinced they will last forever.

They fall.

New empires rise and assume the previous empires simply lacked their particular brilliance.

They fall.

Leaders cultivate personality cults.

Populations surrender critical thought.

Minorities are blamed for complex problems.

Fear becomes political currency.

Opponents become enemies.

Enemies become less than human.

Violence becomes acceptable.

Truth becomes inconvenient.

Propaganda becomes patriotism.

And afterwards everyone asks:

How could people have allowed this to happen?

Then, given sufficient time, people begin allowing remarkably similar things to happen again.

Not necessarily wearing the same uniforms.

Not necessarily carrying the same flags.

Not necessarily speaking the same language.

History rarely repeats itself with identical costumes.

That is why we fail to recognize it.

We are waiting for yesterday’s villain to walk through the door wearing yesterday’s hat.

Meanwhile today’s version has changed the tailoring.

We remember dates.

We memorize battles.

We erect statues.

We hold commemorations.

We say, “Never again.”

Then we reproduce the psychological conditions that made “again” possible.

What exactly did we learn?

THE MORAL COSTUME

Perhaps humanity’s greatest masterpiece is not technology.

Perhaps it is self-image.

We are extraordinarily attached to thinking well of ourselves.

Good.

Honest.

True.

Faithful.

Kind.

Decent.

Moral.

Patriotic.

Compassionate.

Righteous.

We adore these words.

We attach them to ourselves, our tribes, our institutions and our beliefs.

But words are cheap

Kindness that exists only when convenient is not particularly impressive.

Honesty that disappears when truth becomes costly is not honesty.

Faith that requires hatred of another human being deserves serious examination.

Patriotism that demands blindness is not love of country.

Morality that applies only to one’s opponents is not morality.

Compassion that stops at the boundary of one’s own tribe is merely preference.

Goodness proclaimed loudly enough does not magically become goodness.

Humanity has spent centuries confusing claiming virtue with practising it.

We declare ourselves peaceful while supporting violence.

We call ourselves compassionate while tolerating suffering.

We proclaim equality while protecting privilege.

We demand honesty while rewarding whichever lie best confirms what we already believe.

Then we become furious when anyone points out the contradiction.

RELIGION, POLITICS AND THE HUMAN EGO

Human beings have created extraordinary systems of belief.

Some have inspired art, charity, sacrifice, community, courage and profound acts of love.

Others have been used to justify persecution, conquest, division and bloodshed.

The same is true of politics.

Political ideas can improve lives, protect freedoms and correct injustice.

They can also become tribal identities so powerful that reason itself becomes secondary.

The danger begins when an idea becomes more important than the human being standing in front of us.

When doctrine becomes sacred and compassion negotiable.

When belonging to the correct camp matters more than behaving correctly.

When disagreement becomes betrayal.

When questions become disloyalty.

When certainty becomes virtue.

Because once human beings convince themselves that they possess absolute righteousness, almost anything can be justified.

Cruelty becomes duty.

Censorship becomes protection.

Violence becomes necessity.

Hatred becomes virtue.

The person committing the act can still look into the mirror and see a good human being.

That is the terrifying power of certainty without humility.

ALWAYS SOMEBODY ELSE’S FAULT

And so we arrive at humanity’s favourite destination.

Blame.

There is always someone available.

We blame politicians while voting without thought.

We blame corporations while buying without thought.

We blame media while sharing nonsense without checking it.

We blame society while forgetting that we constitute society.

We blame future generations for being irresponsible while leaving them our debts, conflicts and environmental damage.

We blame previous generations for giving us the world we inherited while refusing to consider what kind of world we are handing onward.

Everyone points.

Almost nobody notices that when everyone points outward, responsibility disappears.

Perhaps that is precisely the attraction.

Responsibility is uncomfortable.

Blame is wonderfully relaxing.

Blame requires nothing from us.

If everything is somebody else’s fault, then we need change nothing about ourselves.

We can remain exactly as we are while demanding that everybody else improve.

What a perfect arrangement.

THE MIRROR

But eventually humanity must face the mirror.

Not America.

Not Britain.

Not China.

Not Russia.

Not Europe.

Not Africa.

Not Asia.

Not Christians.

Not Muslims.

Not Jews.

Not Hindus.

Not atheists.

Not liberals.

Not conservatives.

Not rich.

Not poor.

Not black.

Not white.

Not gay.

Not straight.

Not male.

Not female.

Humanity.

All of us.

Because beneath every flag, ideology, religion, nationality, race, class and identity is the same inconvenient creature:

A human being.

Capable of astonishing love.

Capable of astonishing cruelty.

Capable of reason.

Capable of absurdity.

Capable of generosity.

Capable of greed.

Capable of building.

Capable of destroying.

We contain the contradiction.

The enemy is not always somewhere else.

Sometimes the enemy is the part of ourselves that wants certainty more than truth.

The part that wants victory more than peace.

The part that wants wealth more than fairness.

The part that wants comfort more than responsibility.

The part that wants someone to blame.

AND YET…

Here is where the story becomes complicated.

Because for all my criticism of humanity, there is another side.

Human beings also run into burning buildings to save strangers.

They donate organs to people they will never meet.

They adopt abandoned children.

They rescue animals.

They sit beside dying strangers so they do not die alone.

They create hospitals.

They teach.

They nurse.

They volunteer.

They forgive.

They rebuild cities after disasters.

They cross battlefields to carry wounded people to safety.

They create music in concentration camps and jokes in hospital wards.

They share food when they themselves have little.

They challenge injustice when remaining silent would be safer.

They love people society tells them not to love.

They defend people they have been taught to fear.

They change their minds.

They apologize.

They begin again.

This is humanity too.

And perhaps this is precisely why our failures are so infuriating.

We cannot claim incapacity.

We know we are capable of better.

We have demonstrated it countless times.

Our tragedy is not that goodness is beyond us.

Our tragedy is that we practise it inconsistently.

We have compassion.

We simply ration it.

We have intelligence.

We selectively use it.

We understand consequences.

We ignore inconvenient ones.

We know history.

We repeat it anyway.

We value life.

Until that life belongs to the wrong person.

PERHAPS EVOLUTION MEANS SOMETHING ELSE

We like to imagine human progress as technological.

Faster computers.

Smarter machines.

Longer lives.

Taller buildings.

More powerful telescopes.

Better medicine.

Artificial intelligence.

Space exploration.

All magnificent achievements.

But perhaps genuine human evolution will not be measured by how far our spacecraft travel.

Perhaps it will be measured by how we treat the person next door.

Perhaps civilization should not be judged by the wealth of its richest citizens but by the dignity afforded its poorest.

Perhaps progress is not the ability to create a weapon capable of destroying a continent.

Perhaps progress is reaching the point where nobody wishes to use one.

Perhaps intelligence is not merely knowing how to do something.

Perhaps intelligence includes knowing whether it should be done.

Perhaps freedom is not simply the right to pursue whatever we desire.

Perhaps it includes accepting responsibility for the consequences.

Perhaps morality is not what we say we believe.

Perhaps morality is what we actually do when belief becomes inconvenient.

Perhaps being human is not an achievement.

Perhaps it is an assignment.

One we have not yet completed.

THE REVOLUTION OF RESPONSIBILITY

What would happen if humanity stopped asking:

“Whose fault is this?”

We began asking:

“What is my part in fixing it?”

That would be revolutionary.

Not another ideology.

Not another flag.

Not another political movement promising paradise once the correct people are defeated.

Something far more difficult.

Personal responsibility.

Intellectual humility.

Compassion without tribal boundaries.

The courage to admit error.

The willingness to change one’s mind when evidence changes.

The ability to disagree without dehumanizing.

The maturity to understand that two things can sometimes be true simultaneously.

The wisdom to recognize that certainty is not the same thing as truth.

The discipline to think beyond tomorrow.

The imagination to care about people we will never meet.

Imagine if those qualities became humanity’s status symbols.

Imagine leaders boasting about how many people they lifted from poverty rather than how many weapons they possessed.

Imagine nations competing to have the healthiest children, cleanest rivers, best schools and lowest levels of hunger.

Imagine billionaires competing to solve humanity’s greatest problems.

Imagine political parties occasionally saying their opponents had a good idea.

Steady on.

Perhaps I have gone too far.

One miracle at a time.

WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF EXCUSES

Earlier civilizations could plead ignorance.

We cannot.

We know too much.

We understand too much.

We are connected too closely.

A human being suffering on the opposite side of the planet is no longer an abstraction.

We can see the face.

Hear the voice.

Watch the destruction.

Witness the hunger.

We cannot honestly say:

“We didn’t know.”

Increasingly, history’s question to us will be:

“You knew. So what did you do?”

That is a considerably harder question.

We knew the planet was being damaged.

What did we do?

We knew people were hungry.

What did we do?

We knew hatred was being cultivated.

What did we do?

We knew lies were spreading.

What did we do?

We knew enormous inequality existed.

What did we do?

We knew weapons capable of catastrophic destruction were proliferating.

What did we do?

We knew.

At some point knowledge becomes responsibility.

A SPECIES AT THE CROSSROADS

Humanity may now possess something no previous generation possessed to the same degree:

The power to influence the future of the entire planet.

That is an astonishing responsibility.

Frankly, judging by our historical behaviour, handing humanity planetary-scale power sometimes feels rather like giving a toddler the keys to a nuclear submarine.

We have become technologically adult while remaining emotionally adolescent.

Our tools have evolved faster than our wisdom.

Our weapons have evolved faster than our compassion.

Our communication has evolved faster than our ability to listen.

Our access to information has evolved faster than our ability to distinguish truth from nonsense.

Our capacity for consumption has evolved faster than our understanding of enough.

That gap may define the future.

Humanity does not necessarily need more intelligence.

We need more wisdom.

Intelligence asks:

Can we?

Wisdom asks:

Should we?

Intelligence builds the bomb.

Wisdom prevents its use.

Intelligence creates wealth.

Wisdom asks what wealth is for.

Intelligence wins an argument.

Wisdom asks whether the argument was worth having.

Intelligence can conquer.

Wisdom understands that conquest rarely conquers hatred.

THE FINAL IRONY

Here we are.

Humanity.

The self-proclaimed pinnacle of earthly intelligence.

Armed to the teeth.

Unable to feed everyone.

Surrounded by wealth.

Tolerating poverty.

Dependent upon one planet.

Polluting it.

Haunted by history.

Repeating it.

Capable of compassion.

Choosing indifference.

Terrified of enemies.

Creating them.

Demanding honesty.

Preferring comforting lies.

Claiming humility.

Practising arrogance.

Claiming peace.

Preparing for war.

Claiming morality.

Excusing cruelty.

Claiming intelligence.

Behaving stupidly.

Claiming responsibility.

Blaming everybody else.

Through it all, humanity continues to stand proudly upon its little piece of rock hurtling through an unimaginably vast universe, chest puffed out, absolutely certain of its own importance.

Perhaps somewhere among the billions of galaxies there are advanced civilizations watching us.

If so, I imagine their scientific reports make fascinating reading.

Planet: Earth.

Dominant species: Human.

Intelligence: Considerable.

Wisdom: Under investigation.

Primary behaviour: Tribal.

Notable achievement: Capable of understanding its own problems.

Notable weakness: Frequently refuses to.

Survival prospects: Entirely dependent upon whether subject eventually develops common sense.

There may still be hope.

Because humanity’s contradictions contain our salvation as well as our destruction.

The species capable of hatred is capable of love.

The species capable of war is capable of peace.

The species capable of greed is capable of generosity.

The species capable of destroying forests is capable of restoring them.

The species capable of creating injustice is capable of correcting it.

The species capable of believing lies is capable of seeking truth.

The species capable of repeating history is capable — theoretically, at least — of learning from it.

But first we must abandon perhaps the most dangerous illusion of all:

That somebody else is humanity.

There is no somebody else.

There is only us.

Every generation inherits an unfinished world.

Every generation complains about what the previous generation did to it.

Every generation promises to do better.

Every generation eventually becomes the previous generation.

So perhaps the question is not whether humanity is good or evil.

It is not.

We are both.

The question is which side of ourselves we choose to cultivate.

Whether we can develop wisdom quickly enough to control the extraordinary power our intelligence has placed in our hands.

Whether we can finally understand that another person’s suffering does not become less real because they speak another language, worship another god, vote differently, love differently or were born on the other side of an imaginary line drawn across a map.

Whether we can recognize that Earth is not something humanity owns.

It is something humanity depends upon.

Whether we can understand that feeding a hungry child is not charity bestowed by the superior upon the unfortunate.

It is civilization doing its job.

Whether we can finally learn that admitting a mistake is not weakness.

It is evidence of intelligence.

Whether we can stop inheriting hatred as though it were a family heirloom.

Whether we can stop teaching children whom they are supposed to fear before they are old enough to understand why.

Whether we can stop treating kindness as sentimental and cruelty as strength.

Whether we can stop confusing wealth with worth.

Whether we can stop calling destruction victory.

Whether we can stop looking for enemies long enough to recognize ourselves.

Because humanity’s greatest threat may never have been the bomb.

Or pollution.

Or poverty.

Or ideology.

Or religion.

Or politics.

Or technology.

Those things are instruments.

The deeper danger is the human capacity to justify almost anything while remaining convinced of its own righteousness.

That is the monster beneath the bed.

Unfortunately, it is our bed.

Perhaps humanity will survive long enough to mature.

I hope so.

Because despite everything, I rather like us.

We are ridiculous.

Contradictory.

Infuriating.

Brilliant.

Cruel.

Tender.

Arrogant.

Generous.

Selfish.

Heroic.

Absurd.

We write symphonies and start wars.

We paint masterpieces and draw borders.

We discover cures and invent weapons.

We look through telescopes searching for intelligent life while occasionally providing remarkably little evidence of it down here.

But we also love.

Perhaps love — stripped of slogans, ownership, tribalism and conditions — remains our greatest possibility.

Not sentimental love.

Courageous love.

The kind that recognizes another human being before noticing the label attached to them.

The kind that says your child’s life matters to me even though I will never meet them.

The kind that plants a tree knowing someone else will sit beneath it.

The kind that admits:

I was wrong.

The kind that asks:

How can I help?

The kind that understands humanity is not eight billion separate competitions for survival.

We are passengers on the same astonishing, fragile vessel.

There is no lifeboat marked RICH.

There is no second atmosphere for conservatives.

No private ocean for liberals.

No Christian climate.

No Muslim climate.

No Jewish climate.

No atheist climate.

No American oxygen.

No Russian oxygen.

No Chinese water.

No European sun.

Nature has never shown much interest in our categories.

Perhaps we might learn something from her.

We have spent thousands of years asking who is right.

Perhaps the future depends upon asking something else.

What is right?

Not for my tribe.

Not for my bank account.

Not for my political party.

Not for my religion.

Not merely for my country.

For humanity.

For the child who has not yet been born.

For the planet that gave us everything and asked for remarkably little in return.

That would require maturity.

It would require humility.

It would require us to admit that perhaps we are not quite as civilized as the brochures suggest.

Most painfully of all, it would require humanity to surrender its favourite excuse.

“It wasn’t me.”

Yes.

It was.

It was us.

That is actually the hopeful part.

Because if we created many of these problems, then we possess the ability to change many of them.

The moment we accept responsibility is the moment we regain power.

Not power over each other.

Something far more useful.

Power over ourselves.

Perhaps that is the final stage of civilization.

Not conquering the world.

Conquering our own worst instincts.

Until then, humanity will continue its extraordinary performance.

Armed to the teeth while preaching peace.

Hoarding wealth while discussing poverty.

Polluting its home while talking about progress.

Repeating history while commemorating it.

Hurting its neighbours while proclaiming love.

Playing the victim while refusing responsibility.

Pointing in every conceivable direction except inward.

All the while assuring itself:

We are the intelligent ones.

We are the civilized ones.

We are the good ones.

Really?

After everything we know?

After everything we have seen?

After everything history has tried desperately to teach us?

After all the wars, famines, persecutions, hatreds, divisions and needless suffering?

Still it is always somebody else’s fault?

Oh, Humanity.

Please.

"  GIVE ME A BREAK "