The trouble with the human race

We humans really are a weird lot, aren’t we?

We all spend most of our time hating and mistrusting each other when in fact, most of us have basically the same problems as everyone else we know, carry the same blood in our veins whatever the colour of our skins, and if we could only trust each other more, life would be easier for all of us!

I reckon the weirdest thing of all is the way we seem to always want to fight amongst our own kind, rather than people with totally different points of view or skin colours to ours.

Take for instance (and just for starters), Christians. Go to Northern Ireland and see how the Catholics and the Protestants get on, even now, when they are supposed to be at some sort of peace with each other. They are both worshipping the same God, they use the same Bible and they walk the same streets, but for many years they suffered pretty well open warfare against each other, the Orangemen versus the IRA, shooting, bombing and torturing anyone from ‘the other side’.

If there is a God, he must have wrung his hands in desperation at what was going on in the Emerald Isle, one of the most beautiful places in the world!

Now let’s have a look at the people of the Middle East. I would guess there are many more Arabs killed by other Arabs, than are killed by any other group. You only have to look as far as present day Syria to see this going on, or a few years back when it was Iran and Iraq having a go at each other. And on top of all that there is also ISIS to worry about, a totally out-of-control group that seems to hate the whole world, Arab or not. All they want is for everyone else to bend their knee to Sharia Law, no matter how cruel and archaic that set of laws is. And their hatred is aimed as much at moderate Muslims, as it is at anyone else.

Even in America we had the northern states against the south over the problem of slavery, a deeply held point of view that may not be fully eradicated for several more generations yet. And this is happening in the richest, most advanced country in the world!

Finally, we have the totally opposite instance, where the blond, white people of Germany during the 1930’s, implacably hated German Jews, encouraged by a leader who made it his immortal duty to wipe out every Jew in the world. Where the hatred originated I have no idea, not having studied the subject closely enough, but it certainly existed! So the Jewish Germans had to suffer the Holocaust, as it became known; the worst case of mass murder the world has ever known, stopped only because Hitler fortunately lost the war and his sanity. Had he not, I guess there wouldn’t be a Jew left on Earth now!

No, as I said at the start of this blog, we really are a weird lot; we destroy what we want most and then spend vast amounts of hard-earned money re-building everything, only, it seems, to knock it all down again a couple of centuries later – and mostly to spite the very people who are closest to us!

Will we ever grow up, and start living like human beings?

Do you agree with Brian?