A Plea for Sanity

I don't often use this blog for political or personal rhetoric, but I am disturbed, appalled, and, frankly, frightened enough by what I see happening around me that I had to speak up.

I grew up a child of the 60s, a decade dominated by protests of every kind and the nightly death counts of young soldiers fighting in a war we did not want nor in which we should have been a participant. I’ve watched the world go from Cold War to real wars and crimes against humanity, from riots to people setting themselves on fire to protest civil rights struggles, Apartheid, and genocide of every color, flavor, and nationality. I’ve also watched the fall of the Berlin Wall and the passage of landmark civil and human rights legislature, granting all people the same rights and freedoms we hold dear.

The struggle was painful and often bloody to get to a point where mankind might–by a very slim, hopeful chance–finally find a way to put aside their differences and live together on this planet as one people. It wasn’t an easy battle, but it was a worthwhile and noble one. A battle worthy of a people who wanted to evolve into the kind of world where race, religion, belief, nationality, gender, and sexual orientation were secondary to species because, at the end of the day, WE ARE ALL HUMAN.

But never–NEVER–in all my years, have I witnessed the kind of widespread hatred, bigotry, and sheer entitled vehemence against one’s fellow man as we are seeing in the world today. Soulless, money-worshipping corporations that care for nothing but the bottom line, terrorist zealots who hide behind religion to commit unspeakable acts for the sake of some twisted sense of glory, power-hungry politicians who are so entrenched in their own personal and partisan agendas that they completely ignore the will of the voters who put them there, and a media that went from reporting the news to fanning the fires of hatred and civil unrest for the sake of ratings and readership–all have beaten down and bullied the populace into either capitulating to their own inhuman crusades or watching themselves become buried in a relentless tide of powerless despair.

We are all on a runaway train to our own destruction, and if we don’t wake up, look around, block out the noise, rhetoric, and rampant inhumanity prevalent in our society and extend an olive branch to the person next to us–regardless of their similarities or differences–we won’t have to worry about global warming or some natural or space-born disaster destroying the planet because we, as a species, won’t be here to see it. Even if we somehow manage to survive such a cataclysmic showdown, humanity as we know it will have ceased to exist.