I'm quite tired with people today. I'm tried of the dark and depressing aspects of human nature we see all about us: hatred, intolerance, prejudice, exclusion, demagoguery, and despair. Sure, it's in the news we get each day of still more violence and bloodshed in lands far away. But its here too, right in our backyard, in our community, in our workplaces, in us. We cannot lament the worst aspects of human nature without implicating ourselves. Perhaps thats why the reminders of our own failings as a species are so depressing – somewhere, deep down, we know that the darkness within others only proves the existence of darkness within ourselves.
Why then must we always judge and condemn each other? Why then must we still live in a time when human beings live in perpetual fear of the judgment of their neighbors? Why, in this age of “progress” in this land of “freedom,” must human beings hide the most precious parts of themselves for fear of rejection and retribution? Why must I constantly be forced to endure listening to human beings malign other human beings in the most denigrating, dehumanizing, destructive, and painful ways, giving full vent to their misguided intolerance of their brothers and sisters.
There is so much that unites us, that makes us one family. Why must we continue to look for and exploit the little things that make us different? Rich, poor, black, white, Christian, Muslim, gay, straight, male, female – these things don't really matter, not in the largest sense of the word. What matters is that we all are alive and aware of ourselves, we think and breathe and feel pain. We struggle as best we can in our respective situations to be happy, to be loved, to defy death. This common struggle of being alive and sentient in an ever-more crowded and metropolitan world should (in the most idealistic sense of the word) be enough to prove the tragically and often fatally flawed nature of intolerance to be the worst of all the sins.
I believe in the rule of law. I know that the actions of some cannot, for the good of all, be tolerated and must be punished and opposed. But there is a reason why the power of judgment is not invested with the public (you and me) but in our legal system which, optimistically, provides every single person with the opportunity to defend themselves fairly and to be treated without bias. I was also taught to believe in a semi-tolerant God who would, in the end, pronounce a final judgment on all of us, rewarding some and condemning others. If such a being exists, then a judgment of such finality surely belongs to him and we are to blame for making it in his place.
I don't know what else to say, because most of what I feel right now doesn't have any place in words. I want to make a plea for compassion, sympathy, tolerance, and forbearance, but I don't know to whom I should direct it. We are all to blame. Thus speaks the disillusioned idealist dying cynically in a flawed world.
Why then must we always judge and condemn each other? Why then must we still live in a time when human beings live in perpetual fear of the judgment of their neighbors? Why, in this age of “progress” in this land of “freedom,” must human beings hide the most precious parts of themselves for fear of rejection and retribution? Why must I constantly be forced to endure listening to human beings malign other human beings in the most denigrating, dehumanizing, destructive, and painful ways, giving full vent to their misguided intolerance of their brothers and sisters.
There is so much that unites us, that makes us one family. Why must we continue to look for and exploit the little things that make us different? Rich, poor, black, white, Christian, Muslim, gay, straight, male, female – these things don't really matter, not in the largest sense of the word. What matters is that we all are alive and aware of ourselves, we think and breathe and feel pain. We struggle as best we can in our respective situations to be happy, to be loved, to defy death. This common struggle of being alive and sentient in an ever-more crowded and metropolitan world should (in the most idealistic sense of the word) be enough to prove the tragically and often fatally flawed nature of intolerance to be the worst of all the sins.
I believe in the rule of law. I know that the actions of some cannot, for the good of all, be tolerated and must be punished and opposed. But there is a reason why the power of judgment is not invested with the public (you and me) but in our legal system which, optimistically, provides every single person with the opportunity to defend themselves fairly and to be treated without bias. I was also taught to believe in a semi-tolerant God who would, in the end, pronounce a final judgment on all of us, rewarding some and condemning others. If such a being exists, then a judgment of such finality surely belongs to him and we are to blame for making it in his place.
I don't know what else to say, because most of what I feel right now doesn't have any place in words. I want to make a plea for compassion, sympathy, tolerance, and forbearance, but I don't know to whom I should direct it. We are all to blame. Thus speaks the disillusioned idealist dying cynically in a flawed world.
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