My heart weeps for what is going on here in Saint Louis, but it equally weeps for people in Gaza, Israeli’s in Israel so afraid of a few that they feel they have to resort to bombing the many, a million of Iraqi’s fleeing for their lives, for people in Liberia and Sierra Leone who are fighting an incurable disease and out of fear attack relief workers, for a plane full of travelers that gets shot down over the Ukraine because… well nobody knows exactly why.And it weeps equally for the loss of Robin Williams, because for me all those things are connected. And I have heard people say that there are bigger things at play here, and indeed the injustice, structural inequality, and racism experienced on a daily basis seem incongruent to the death of a comedian… And yet, for me what they all have in common is the fact that after thousands of years of ‘civilization’ we still struggle with our humanity.
People who value humanity don’t blow innocent people out of the sky, they don’t kill you because you believe differently than they do, they don’t shoot you because your difference represents an automatic threat, they don’t switch from ‘protect and serve’ to ‘waging war’ at the first sign of trouble. And I know it sounds simple, but to me that’s what it boils down to. We are struggling to affirm our humanity and fall back on easy excuses to deny others theirs. And when even a person so gifted and brilliant to spread joy to millions of people all over the world is unable to affirm his own humanity, then where are we? It is theorized that the Ebola virus comes from bats, whose habitats have been so encroached by humans, and that these bats who are normally human shy are forced to come in contact with us because of our own doing. It is a theory and there are many variations, but the bottomline here is that our disregard to humanity is not limited to our human neighbors but to our co-planet inhabitants as well, and it is kicking us in the butt. We have been looting, rioting, killing, raping, trespassing, encroaching for thousands of years. When are we going to do better? When do we stop using exuses like “well he/she looked different, sounded different, believed different, acted different…” as a justification to harm someone or something or some species? Newsflash, there is no them, there is only us and some of us. We are all in this together from mountaintops in KY, to fruit bats in Guinee, to the streets in Saint Louis. And so I disagree that it is about the big things, I think it is about the small things, about affirming our humanity every minute of every day. How do you speak, think, treat your neighbor as well as your self. What do you stand for? Do your actions represent what you know in your heart to be right, or are there more excuses? We know enough, we’ve been around enough. Let’s do something different.