Can We at Least be Humane?

What would a perfect world look like? I don’t know. Probably very sterile and boring. I don’t really want a perfect world. I’d be happy with just a humane one.

Dictionary.com defines humane as, “characterized by tenderness, compassion, and sympathy for people and animals; especially for the suffering or distressed: acting in a manner that causes the least harm to people or animals.”

When I was a boy I used to spend a few days with my paternal grandparents whom I called Nana and Granddad. They were both gentle souls, quiet, kind people.

One afternoon after Nana had fixed me lunch in the kitchen and I had finished eating, I took my plate to the sink to wash it. I noticed a small spider on the window sill and asked Nana for the flyswatter so I could kill it. She said, “Oh honey, don’t hurt it. It’s not poisonous. It’s not bothering anyone. And it will eventually find its way outside.”

I will never forget how at that moment I started feeling a deeper sense of compassion for all living things—people, animals, and insects. They all have their purpose.

As an adult, I often turned to that teaching moment in Nana’s kitchen. I realized if I saw the world as sacred and everyone and everything in it as valuable, I would be a gentler person myself. More open to others. More willing to be tolerant of the differences in people. I understood that I could be more humane.

This simple truth often seems lost on many of us and too often on our leaders. Politics today is about gaining power for private financial gain and personal ambitions. It’s not about service, wisdom, or goodwill. Our president carries on his usual business dealings, some glaringly inappropriate and possibly illegal, while taking resources away from the poor, the sick, the immigrant, the minorities, the old, and the disabled.

Congress bows their heads in prayer for children and teens being murdered in their school classrooms but refuses to do anything to stop the prolific and insane sale of military weapons to anyone who wants them and who then may choose to use them against the innocent. Their prayers don’t mean anything and neither do their idle acts of concern. What means something is their indifference and their inaction. That, we clearly get.

The political arena, whatever it has been in the past, is without a doubt today a crowd of compromised, autocratic egoists, who seem totally disinterested in fairness, justice, equality, or the general goodwill of the nation. Their entire purpose seems focused solely on themselves and being the accomplices of a pervasive corruption of our political process.

There isn’t simply the lack of morals there, or ethics, or even conscience. There is that. But worse, there is the obvious loss of our leaders just being humane. Having enough humanity in them to be responsible and worthy and credible for the important work we citizens have elected them to do.

This poisonous lack of human goodness grows indiscriminately and infects all of us. We become a nation that is cynical, angry, immune to the sufferings and the basic needs of one another. If there are differences between us, if someone offends us, if we are betrayed in some way, our first response seems to be to react with violence. Guns are our non-negotiable terms of a settlement. For far too many our amazing freedom means nothing if we cannot be armed with assault weapons and the right to kill on instinct, out of little more than curiosity, personal insult, or the urge to get revenge.

A co-worker returned from maternity leave to the office this week. She showed pictures of her newborn. A happy, bright-eyed baby boy beaming with health and innocence. I looked long at his photo. His tiny hands and feet. His intense eyes alive with wonder. I thought, will he resist whatever coarse and callous behavior of his generation? Will he grow into a person characterized by compassion and sympathy, someone who does no harm to others? Will he be humane?

I hope so.

I hope it is possible for those of us setting examples before him to be humane ourselves. I even hope it is still possible for our leaders. Before it’s too late.

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If I had five minutes to evacuate--what would I take with me?

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The Unclad Soul

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