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Life Arts    H3'ed 4/3/09

Regarding Humanity

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Message Jon Faulkner

The human race will live under the threat of extinction as long as it fails to recognize its failure in caring for one another. A happy child lights up the world, and every life it touches. Toys, having enough to eat, the love and attention of family are denied to millions of children whose eyes, full of sorrow and pain, look out upon a world that has failed them utterly. Millions of children have never heard a kind word spoken. Millions more will not live long enough to recognize the world need not be so cruel.

Humanity, if it expects to survive, must devote every resource in bringing light into the lives of the children of the world. Humanity could find itself across borders of race and nationality if its concerted effort were directed to the basic fundamental that if one human life is neglected the diminishment of all life must follow. All the weapons of war can never hold back the hunger that every human being possesses for the enrichment of life. Until humanity grows up enough to recognize this incontrovertible fact it will continue living under an inevitable death sentence. Charles Dickens knew this, as did many before him. "This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased."

Rightist Governments the world over are contemptuous of such sentiment. In the U.S. the Republican Party is even disdainful of providing for its own. Viewing the wreckage of the U.S. financial industry, and the vast sums of public dollars invested in its repair, the republican obsession of doing away with “welfare as we know it” rings a bit hollow, as does the republican parties self proclaimed possession of moral values. The truth is that in no contemporary, or historical context, has the Republican Party ever advocated for anyone other than its own material interests.

Rightists are true victims of limited intellect. For that they can be forgiven. But to cause unwarranted harm to the children who live within the U.S, they can never be forgiven. The right is a composite representation of unimaginative people. They must look into a mirror that reflects the abject poverty of millions to realize their own comparative sense of worth. They essentially cannot help alleviate the conditions of poverty and want, because to do so would interrupt the standard by which they judge themselves, and humanity. Their shallowness is at once a curse and an advantage. Even those they disparage support them by the edification they feel because few people want to commit themselves to the ranks of the poor and ignorant.

All of this is today considered by many as gauche, a sentimental journey into clap trap. But such observations as Dickens cannot be dismissed easily. The world contains billions of human souls, many of which will never be fortunate enough to read the thoughts of the world’s greatest thinkers. They will never be fortunate enough to escape early demise as the planet hurtles through space at 17 miles a second and humanity, like a collection of bugs under an overturned log, hastens to and fro in an effort to realize some sense of morality that must be dependent upon whichever definition of such may be currently in vogue.

 

 

 

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Jon Faulkner is a licensed Master Mariner. He has long considered the conservative republican mindset a form of mental illness. He lives in northern Maine.
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