I wonder why the human race is so stupid. We march around the world, pretending we own the place-building, changing, controlling. When a volcanoe erups, a hurricane drowns a city, an earthquake buries countries, we are powerless but won't admit it. We settle anywhere that will sustain life and command the elements not to disturb us. We settle anywhere that will sustain life and commnd the elements not to disturb us. Over and over we are confronted with the awe-inspiring forces of nature, but our only responce is a quick burst of worldwide sympathy and aid, followed by a neat tally of donations whose numbers are then used to assist in elections.
Billions of dollars were sent to the Hurricane Katrina victims, relief was prepared. Before that, newspapers were flooded with survival stories and pleadings from tsunami victims. Yet now, what seems like so long after these horrors, the zealous spirit to help has been lost. The influence of humans does not extend to controlling the weather. But we are given the decision of what to do, of how to repair others when disaster strikes and long after it.
We refuse to learn from history, fighting over the same things over and over again. Starting at a young age, with small, repeated bickers over the same toy, this continues far into our lives. We fight in junior high then high school over friends and boys. If we losem we go back for more and hold a grudge that will poison everything else. The world war fights are so similar to each other that if you learn a few, you learn them all. Europe fights over royalties, and the phrase "thousands dead in the streets of Paris" can be played on a tape recorder on a loop. America has entangles itself in a war that is now being compared to Vietnam.
Yet we ccontinue on. We think of ourselves before others, and then we are shocked when we see the statistics of people going hungry. We send millions of dollars in aid across the ocean and turn a blind ere to those starving in our own community. People wonder how a parent can physically harm a child, and yet some will shout and swear at their spouse in front of a little one they think doesn't understand. Why do we feel sympathy for those with tears streaming down their TV faces but we can't see the pain of a weeping soul right next to us? We place judgments without understanding what goes on behind the doors of someone else's home, or what struggles they hide inside.
In the past we have enslaved fellow en, forcing them to bend to our will. Denying them the very right that we fight for daily and demand for ourselves. Even now, though not quite as literally, we have enslaved those that are not considered wealthy. They live without a living wage. Many families are unable to afford insurance and therefore doctors. The elderly are bound by complicated forms of Medicare insurance policies that make no sense.
We run our lives with hypocritical statements. We get angry and punish people if they do something we don't like. Then we turn around to do the exact same thing to the next person we see, from back-biting friends taking revenge on each other to politicians who can't keep their self-respect high without shooting others down. Civilized countries balk the inhumanity of war. But we broke the rules we'd set to prevent violations of basic human rights. Prisoners are kept withut knowing what they've been charged with-no chance at a trial or a lawyer, violating the very thing that sparked our contry into being.
We try to fix the small things that will disappear with time, ignore the harder problems no one wants to face. Leave them for the next generation to deal with. Debt mounts as someone else's problem, economies are teetering, and politicians are pulling up long-dead or nonexistant problems to distract us. In high school, one-week flings are treated like the real deal, and before you know it, choices lead you to have to make it the real deal. Our government applies Machavelli's "the end justifies the means," defending a patched-up job in Iraq with the accomplishment of a goal unrelated to why we began the fight.
Now, after I'm done typing this, and you're done reading it, we will all go out into the world and do the same thing we have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. We will be humans. We will close our eyes once more to the pain of the world because it hurts too much to see it. Because we are afraid we might see a little of that wrong in our own life. We are afraid of what we can't control, what we can't solve, and what we don't understand. I wonder why this cycle goes on and on, spreading throught the generations like some mutates diesease. I wonder why we all allow it to happen.
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