The ageless, ever-present, dark heart of humanity has yet another a face and this guy sets a new standard.
“But with dogs, we do have “bad dog.” Bad dog exists. “Bad dog! Bad dog! Stole a biscuit, bad dog!” The dog is saying, “Who are you to judge me? You human beings who’ve had genocide, war against people of different creeds, colors, religions, and I stole a biscuit?! Is that a crime? People of the world!”
“Well, if you put it that way, I think you’ve got a point. Have another biscuit, sorry.”” Eddie Izzard
“What connects two thousand years of genocide? Too much power in too few hands.”
Simon Wiesenthal
The horror of it all. The unspeakable dark heart of humanity has been recently running more amok than usual. Of course it's been running amok for a while. I'd say, since evolution completed the rudimentary genetics that made it uncomfortable for those ape-like creatures to stay up in the trees. Minus our prehensile feet and tails, we thus became "human"-- you, me, Jesus, the Pope, Buddha, the Queen of England, John Lennon, Vladimir Lenin, and Groucho and Karl Marx--all of us. We came down from those branches, starting walking around and started looking for trouble--or, more likely, brought the trouble down with us.
But we're all still up there, really, up in those trees howling our savage song; we all carry dark-heart genes in us. They are bone deep and indelible and unexpungable. On good days, in good times, most of us keep them barely suppressed by the need to be civil enough to each other to live together. And you don't have to be the citizen of a third-world country to display the murderous heart. Push us a little too hard and even we comfortable American suburbanites can do things like shoot the other comfortable suburbanites that cut us off in traffic.
That's child play, though--bush league stuff. To get truly world class, we need muddle-brained dictators who hire assassins to slaughter their own people. Or how about skinny, semi-naked, child-pirates launching a grenade at an American warship and then shooting innocent Bible-slinging yachties at point-blank range? How about mass graves revealing the bulldozed remains of thousands of slaughtered innocents. And that's just this week.
Don't ask me for answers. I'm one of you. I have my own well-disguised, nicely suppressed, simmering rages working down deep in me somewhere, too. I can feel them sometimes and it's scary--very scary.
Well, all right, I'll try a suggestion because just complaining doesn't solve anything, and I'll keep it short. Obviously religion doesn't work, nor does the absence of religion help us control our murderous hearts. Here's what I think will work and it's a simple enough rule:
Parents must raise their children in a home free of racism, sexism, religous intolerance, violence, anger, and hostility, where thinking and questioning are encouraged, and where mutual respect and a gentle love for one another is expressed often and sincerely.
That's it. No big news. And it would seem to be not much to ask. Such a simple way to fix the worst of the humanity's ills, and yet.....
All four Americans on this lovely yacht were murdered this week. Staggering amounts of cold blood were needed to complete the task, this 'banality of evil."
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