A thought pondered publicly on my facebook page yesterday:
Hard to decide which is worse today … mother nature or human nature …
Since my thoughts were bouncing around between the hell in Japan going on now, the mess in Libya and the safety of friends in Bahrain … and feeling bloody helpless on all fronts … it seemed a valid point to focus upon.
Responses provide perspectives, as always …
Claire: nah – mother nature does not know spite – revenge – greed. She is an equal opportunities destroyer. Human nature picks off the weak, the frial, the least able to defend themselves.
Wow – that was a bleak thought!!
Bill: Gotta vote for human nature. Mother Nature is great. As Claire pointed out, she is equal opportunity. Do something stupid you get what you probably deserve. Act responsibly, sustainable and with the flow instead of against it and you’re golden. Mostly.
Yes, it does boil down to a case of Nature vs Nuture Murder.
There’s so often very little kind in mankind, as today’s world shows only too well. At a time when thousands upon thousands of fellow humans are suffering the consequences of living on our natural world, the best other thousands can come up with is beating the crap out of their neighbors.
Can we even imagine a world where dealing with the mindless harshness of our planet would be a group effort of global dimensions?
We all know shit happens … quakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, fires, floods, droughts, avalanches, polar shifts, incoming asteroids, solar flares, and on and on and on … and that we are frail, furless creatures at the mercy of said shit. Doesn’t it seem that should be enough to bond us together as a species?
If resources were poured into hedging bets against the forces of nature instead of building weapons stores, our response to catastrophic events would look nothing like it does today. We’d live in safer, stronger places, have plenty of food and water set aside for emergencies and take care of each other, our children, and our futures.
After all, are we not sentient beings? Don’t we have the intelligence to see big pictures, understand consequences and make plans?
How can it happen that, given the instability and unpredictability of the rock we spin through space upon, the total stupidity of placing enough importance on ever-so-slight differences of opinion to have us killing each other makes any sense at all to anyone?
Sure, there were times when Japan was as if another planet and what happened there impacted no one else, when some asshole despot could wipe out a good percentage of his population and nobody would be the wiser. That, however, is no longer the world we live in, and we must be really fucking stupid if we think what happens over there can’t be biting our own personal ass within days or hours or minutes.
And maybe that is the answer: We ARE that fucking stupid.
We’ll continue as humans to be perpetually taken unawares when shit happens, to abuse each other in any way seems fit at any given moment, to foul our own dens and kill our own kind over things that don’t matter in the slightest in any big picture. We’ll learn little from disasters, continue making the same mistakes over and over again and suffer the consequences while shocked by events.
Yep. We are THAT fucking stupid.
A collection of my short stories:
I'm in this one, too ...
And I'm in here, as well ...
Paradise Preoccupied 