Inhumanity on Display

The most profound and powerful lessons of our past year’s travel center on how terribly humans have treated one another, and the environment. Evidence was everywhere we wandered. For example….

Throughout Eastern Europe, we were reminded that the same land has hosted horrors century after century for all of recorded history.

On the Southern Italian peninsula, we saw evidence of one civilization building temples and towns on the ruins it made of another civilization, time after time, for thousands of years.

We learned of Sri Lanka’s decades of brutal civil unrest; and within a month of our departure from that island nation, the world woke to news of Easter morning massacres in its capital city of Colombo.

In both Hawaii and Alaska, we learned of the nearly total disregard for the rights and property and culture and dignity of the native populations by much later settlers from other lands, including the United States which, of course, only became a “new” nation after it eliminated most of one civilization and enslaved much of another.

We have been frequently humbled and sometimes horrified by the role of religious arrogance, and by commercial and governmental greed, and by the blatant brutality and decimating diseases of invading forces and influences.  Their cruelty was not limited to other people.  They also demonstrated disastrous disregard for the limits of natural resources they exploited and the condition of the land, air and water they polluted.

It is the world’s so-called smartest species which has acted and continues to behave the dumbest, and threatens the planet most.

Of course, these thoughts are not novel or new…..

German philosopher Samuel von Pufendorf  wrote in 1673:                    “More inhumanity has been done by man himself than any other of nature’s    causes.”  

Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote in 1784:                                                   “Man’s inhumanity to man / Makes countless thousands morn.”

JER

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