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| Merry Christmas, Mr. Darwin. |
Let’s just admit it.
Darwin was wrong and someone needs to wake him up and tell him his theory was an epic fail. On a large scale. Outside of larger
brain caps and hairless knuckles (for some) the evolution of the human race has
proven to be a myth. Or if not a myth,
it’s a flat-landed joke which ended several millennia ago. Because we are not evolving – in no way do I
see the humanity around me moving upwards into a ‘higher’ state. Nope.
When I look into this train wreck of stupidity and cowardice all I see
is a fast track spiral headed down with glaring heaps of collateral damage piling
up along the tracks. (But as long as it
doesn’t screw with our bank balance what does it matter, right?)
On the whole we are not good at evolution. In fact, on a daily basis I see how badly we
suck at it. Oh, we got the physical side
of it right. But only because it served
our purpose (and we could out-screw the mortality rate. Kinda like rats.) I mean, who wants to waddle
around open fields full of furry predators and wind up as lunch for something
with fangs? But the rest of it? The expanded awareness? The higher intelligence? The ability to think, reason and apply forethought and logic
to further the progress of our species? We not only
missed the mark, apparently most of us have never even made it out of the
quiver.
Of course, there are a few exceptions. Rare individuals who have the capacity to
feel something other than hate, fear and prejudice. Strange human anomalies infected with
insight, compassion and altruism. Weird
folks who are not ruled by their lizard brains.
They’re pretty easy to spot because they don’t fit into this world we
have created. You can see them if you
take a moment to pull your attention out of your bank book and actually look
another person in the face. They’re the
ones that are bleeding to death invisibly right in front of you. They have the
bruised, hollow eyes of a casualty of war. But no worries. They don’t stick around for long given we
have a tendency to kill them off because they make us uncomfortably aware of
how glaringly we have failed to continue the upward motion of progress.
What we are good at is de-evolution. Put anything into the scope of our awareness
and we can erode it down to the lowest, meanest particle, twist it into an invalidated, unrecognizable 'truth' or obliterate it
completely. We literally drag down or
destroy everything we touch. Give us
children and we’ll twist them with the shade and shadow of our stupidity,
feeding them hate and fear like Halloween candy. Put us in view of new and amazing ways to
grow and learn and we’ll demonize them and run screaming the other way. (Or force them to conform to our
own version of reality – even if it destroys them.) Give us amazing forests and we will raze them
to the ground to make particle board furniture that will only last three years.
Vibrant, vital oceans? No problem. We’ve turned them into huge, seething
toilets. Give us hundreds of thousands
of years of history and we will bomb it off the planet without a single thought
(at least the parts we don’t cart off to sell). I mean, we've even turned Charles Darwin into a God-hating atheist when, in fact, the man was a more devote Christian than the apostles who ran and hid when Christ was arrested!
And what about that? Nothing is safe from us.
Not even God. Let's take Christ for
example. We started out with the story
of a compassionate, forgiving, altruistic soul – A radical, intelligent,
compassionate teacher and leader who looked into the status quo of His time and
started a revolution. This man gave love,
aid and forgiveness to anyone no matter who they were, where they came from and
what they had done. He fought the
established system of prejudice and elitism and struggled to bring about the
idea that everyone was equal under the eyes of God. He ate with the poor, fought with the church,
shredded the dogma that divided people and opened the possibility of faith for
everyone. The man believed so deeply in
His cause He voluntarily allowed Himself to be arrested, tortured and murdered
because He thought it would aid the upward growth of humanity.
And over the two-thousand years since His crucifixion we have turned Him
in to a Capitalist, separatist warlord who hates the poor, the whore, and
anyone who isn’t some shade of lighter skin.
Untold masses have been tortured, burned, beheaded,
strangled, sacrificed, bombed, shot, and killed in His name. One half of the entire population (women) has
been regulated to the status of subjugated property to be raped, claimed, traded, bartered
and bred in His name. Vast segments of
the human family whose skin wasn’t quite the right shade or who weren’t born in
quite the right places or who didn’t act quite the right way have been denied
their humanity and placed in the category of animals. In His name. Cultures, creeds and communities have been
eradicated off the face of the world in His name. Treasure and resources have been seized
(stolen) and money has been made (horded) in His name. In fact, more atrocities committed, condoned
and commanded in the name of Christ mar the collective consciousness of human
kind than any other in our long, sad history.
And now, here we are, on the eve of His holiday preparing to
celebrate the event of His birth. And
how are we doing this? On the personal
scale we’re rushing around tired, harried and irritable. We are bitching and moaning about enforced time with the
family (who we can’t stand because we can’t forgive them for the petty slights born from being human) and
we’re spending money we don’t want to spend in the hopes that our gift will be
the best one given (which is more about showing off than showing love, btw). On a global stage – Americans are about to launch
into a four-year reign of justified greed, misogyny and racism with a seated
president (elected mainly by Christians) who is only one-inch right-side of a
low-browed, knuckle-dragging Neanderthal, and I say that because I assume the man understands the basic operation of a zipper.
(He is a self-avowed sexual predator, after all.) And somewhere in all this wonderful
Jesus-season celebration, we’ll rush out to a church and warm a pew so that everyone will see us sitting pretty in our Sunday best. And (maybe) for a few
minutes we'll think about that third-world, non-white infant who was born in a barn to working class parents and died penniless, beaten and broken for humanity. (Seriously, does anyone else get the irony of what we've turned this man into!?)
And how did we get here?
Simple. De-evolution. So, yes, I silently agree with the Christians
I encounter when they inform me (bristling like tomcats in a piss-stained, blind
alley when I wish them a “Happy Holiday” instead of a “Merry Christmas”) Jesus
is their reason for the season. The
greedy, rude, superior, selfish, hate-filled, debt-riddled, compassionless,
capitalist season. Just like Jesus was
their reason for the Holy Inquisition. And the Witch Hunts. And
the justification for slavery. And the
Dark Ages. And the decimation of aboriginal peoples the world over. And whatever new offenses and horrors await
the world (committed in the name of Christ and Country) at the dawn of 2017.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go over here in this
ever-shrinking corner and hang out with a few radical, long-haired, hippy
liberals who think that food, water and even-ground opportunity should be basic
human rights. I might help feed the
poor. I may spend my time comforting the
widowed and the orphaned. I may bake a cake for a gay man or a transvestite. I may hug a Muslim or a Buddhist. I may even
(gasp) give my coat to a homeless person without
telling him to ‘get a job’. Or, (God forbid) find another revolutionary who is
capable of crawling up out of the muck and mire of my animal-brained brothers
and sisters who would be willing to launch yet another attempt to to bring down the status quo. After all, it's the season of hope... and maybe - just maybe - we could make our tendency toward de-evolution work in a good way for a change.
