Something went wrong in America this week. In Ferguson, Mo., a police officer reportedly shot and killed an unarmed black teenager, and then protests erupted, and then vandalism, and then police responded in riot gear, and then photos spread online of armed police pointing rifles at protesters, and then Twitter started to cry. The hashtag #Ferguson spiked tonight with comments such as “brought to you by a collapsing American empire on the verge of a nervous breakdown.” The sad, tragic, sorrowful incident has ballooned into a litmus test of seeing what you want to see wrong with America: racism, poverty, police brutality, crime, vandalism, government overreach, criminal behavior, thugs, victims. And as in the early stage of any war, the anger on every side escalated rapidly.
Put aside your perspective and consider the reality: Once again, human beings are fighting with themselves. We are mad at each other. Something went wrong, which caused further wrongs, and suddenly beings that share 99.999% of their DNA are ready to harm each other. You started it. You wronged me. You should die. As an Israeli or Palestinian cab driver once told The New Yorker, “we must beat them and beat them and beat them with sticks until they stop hating us.” I can’t remember which side said that, but it doesn’t really matter.
The saddest part is our human species may be very rare in the universe, perhaps so rare that we are the only intelligent life to ever emerge on any planet in any galaxy, so killing ourselves is really a crime indeed. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, the four elements required to form life, may be plentiful, but the odds that the combination arose on a planet just the right distance from a star in just the right orbit around the center of a galaxy positioned just so as to avoid the cosmic disasters of pulsing black holes or irradiating extrasolar encounters are so minute that perhaps we should appreciate our intelligence, and the soul of our fellow human beings, should be treasured like a unicorn found in the woods on the verge of extinction. But for some reason, our wrongs against each other escalate until we must fight battles in a street or wars with un-existing nations over perceptions that to make things right we must hurt the others. You can’t see the lines of countries from space, and to an alien discrimination over skin color would make as much sense as disparaging you because your eyes are blue, but humans insist on fighting over fake boundaries and levels of melanin.
I have no answers, only two guesses. (1) Our human instinct for aggression may have helped thousands of generations of our ancestors survive the combative competition of evolution. But in the past few hundred years, as we’ve perfected devices to kill each other, that instinct may lead to our demise. (2) Or perhaps our planet Earth is really a sentient being living as a whole and the over-expansion of the human race is a danger to the center, throwing the balance of the self-regulating ecosystem off kilter, so our human killer instincts are a pre-planned purge to bring all of life back into balance. Scenario (1) means we need to learn to chill. Scenario (2) means the bad computers in the Matrix were right.
If we do end up extinguishing ourselves, the universe will go on, the stars blooming and fading in a dance of progressive creation and destruction. The sadness then will be what could have been, if our species had learned to play together to evolve ourselves. Ferguson is an alarm warning that if we continue to hate each other, in our winning deaths, we all will fail.
velmotus 