An elegy for my faith in humanity

I used to look at charity and love

And think:

Wow, altruism, legit

I used to look at non-violence

And think:

Wow, peace!

So sick

And I used to look at gentleness

And adoption

And veganism

And art and for its own sake

And

Then I would think:

Eat your heart out Darwin!

It seemed to me

Humankind was maneuvering past the crueler policies of

Evolutionary psychology

As a species,

We were rejecting “survival of the fittest”

And choosing to be better than our hypothesized nature

To let our kindness be generous, bold, even irrational,

Rather than transactional

I thought

We were on the cusp

Of the next great, evolutionary leap

Whereby sticks and stones and other bone-hurters

Could be laid aside

In favor of a compassionate action

Love as a verb

And as a universal

Back then

I was bright-eyed enough to believe

That humans were

Inherently

Good

Yes

I had impossibly high hopes

For our species and for our planet and for all the creatures living here with us

Hah!

I believed we were up to the task of being good caretakers

I really believed

That eventual utopia

Was the only logical forecast of our social evolution

Until I was afflicted

Through a glimpse behind the curtain

I saw how crooked

Our grinning veneers

And how fanged

Our broad smiles

Then my bright-eyes were darkened

By a lingering shadow

To me, our kind became

A pretty lie

Concealing

Uglier truths:

For every vegan who sacrifices their diet in order not to harm, there are sadists

Who kill

Not for nutrition

But for fun

And for every peacemaker

Who lives against violence

There are war-profiteers celebrating the sale of yet another bomb

And for every kind soul feeding the hungry

There are rich leeches and ticks, siphoning billions away from the tables of the suffering masses

And for all our proclamations of justice,

We have predators and comic book villains walking free

While sprawling prisons,

Are packed with those too poor to buy favor or leniency

And for all our physicians and healers, we still have people who glory in the injury of others

And the worst violence I glimpsed behind the curtain:

I saw the Most Moral Army In The World snipe, bulldoze, bomb, and torture harmless children

But

Seeing these monstrous extremes of human violence

That’s not what killed my faith in humanity

What truly burned me away was seeing the the world offer only the barest shrug

I no longer believe that we are destined to build utopia

I no longer believe we are capable

Now I am convinced:

Way too many people

Are content

With not caring

Where once I thought a just society would be the imminent result of human goodness

I now believe we are only slated for failure in perpetuity

A festering status quo,

The immense and unbearable result of human apathy

For no amount of time can smooth the human wickedness that lurks in our genome

Not without massive,

Collective

Effort

But our species remains

Apt to shrug

So why this elegy?

I miss feeling that giddy optimism

About us

Today most of what I feel is: ashamed of our kind

But somewhere deep, I’m still in awe of the people who are good despite it all

Altruism is still legit and peace is still sick

Even if “The Good Fight” is a losing battle

…

But…

Then again…

Maybe…

In some ways

A doomed struggle can be more noble

Than

A

Guarantee

And maybe these fighters are a hint

That

We’re not as damned as I think we are