It Turns Out That Life Isn’t Precious
Humans Have a Long Way to Go
Every life on this planet is precious. Any baby — a tiny new life born anywhere in the world — is precious. Life is a miracle. We’re so lucky to be alive.
Yes! There’s something about the words above that can inspire even the hardest of hearts.
These words are designed to encourage humans to practice gratitude, get along with one another, solve problems peacefully, share their bounty with the less fortunate, and count their blessings. Yet, contrary to popular opinion, Mother Nature does not have our happiness in mind, and she never bats an eye when we suffer or die.
When I was a child of barely ten years old, I heard my parents talking about the Holocaust.
That wasn’t the beginning of a lifelong assault on natural empathy, but it certainly took it to a new level. My empathetic nature had already been accosted by cruel things in the world that I couldn’t explain: Why must the baby bird fall out of the nest? Why do bullies exist? What makes someone selfish? But this new awareness of something as grotesque as a man-made plan to annihilate an entire group of people was beyond what my young mind could imagine. My slumber was disturbed by this real-life nightmare — one of countless horror stories since humans gathered around their fires, I daresay. My childish brain wanted answers.
Why is the world so mean?
It’s bad enough that Mother Nature craps on us without giving it a second thought. Just considering the unending ways that humans can die is enough to traumatize anyone. Every time I scan the internet, I run across a new disease that I’ve never heard of before or a hair-raising freak accident. It’s the stuff that nightmares are made of, and we know it. Even though we find it disturbing, we cover our faces while peering through our fingers because we can’t stop looking.
Why is that?
I contend it’s because we’re hoping that the odds might be in our favor whenever someone else is the victim instead. It’s like a game of Russian roulette. Life loads the chamber of the gun, aims it at humanity, and pulls the trigger. If there’s a bullet, how high are the odds that someone else’s head will be the target instead of mine? When we’re spared, it’s a big involuntary “WHEW!”
We can get back to business because we’ve beaten the odds.
But something eventually gets everyone in the end. Doesn’t it? The great equalizer is death. The Grim Reaper stays in business because the clock is set to run out on everyone. We know this. We might not have realized that life was connected to death on the day we were born, but soon we’ll understand it. Usually, around five to seven years old, the cosmic bedtime story that we refuse to tell our kids finds its way into their unassuming awareness despite our best efforts to protect them. They’re most often momentarily devastated — that is, until we weave a series of myths and fairy tales into their consciousness. You know, pure fabrications about living forever in the next life, where we’ll all eventually be reunited.
Yes, that’s where we’ll see Grandma again.
Even though we knew that we’d signed a contract with death the day we chose to give birth to a new life, we’re also painfully aware that telling the truth — one day we’ll all die — is too hard. We refuse to admit, even to ourselves, that our children are going to die. Because we decided to bring them into this world, it makes us feel negligent and selfish. If we allow our minds to linger too long on the inevitable, we might start to regret having given birth in the first place.
We can’t have that.
Our job is to procreate to ensure the survival of the species. The instinct to fulfill this mission is strong, and without giving it much thought, we do what all species have been doing since the beginning of time. We produce new life to replace the old lives that have already been snuffed out.
In that respect, we’re no different than the rabbit I chase from my garden.
We are instinctual and then emotional. On rare occasions, we can be rational. Our large brains are our greatest asset, yet they can also undermine our well-being — and frequently do.
We want to believe that all life is special, but there’s little evidence that this is true.
The other night, I was reminded of a recent human-created atrocity, the kind of organized cruelty that shines a light on our inherent propensity to engage in devastating behaviors. I found myself researching the question of what happened to all the illegal immigrant children who were torn from their parents’ arms in 2017. Babies and toddlers, no less, were taken from their parents and put in metal cages where they received minimal care while left crying for their moms and dads. The following website answered a lot of my questions but not the biggest question of them all: How could grown men and women engage in such a heartless, evil activity? How do they get the screams and cries of those children out of their heads?
How do they sleep at night?
If you want to face a moment of reality, I’ve provided a link to the website where you can see a timeline of these events of horror and medieval cruelty. What were we all doing when this was happening? Frankly, it’s still not over. Many of these children were lost in the shuffle and have not been reunited with their parents. A whole country sat by and let it happen. I’m horrified and ashamed. We all should be. We know these kinds of orchestrated human atrocities have happened many times before. History is full of manmade torture, death, and terror.
So don’t give me that every life is precious bullshit. We lost our right to make those claims centuries ago.
Between Mother Nature and what human nature doles out, being alive is risky business.
Ensuring that all life is precious becomes an impossible task. It’s a human goal that other forms of life seem to lack. We have the capacity to object, to dream, to wish for things we don’t have, and this brings with it a feeling of guilt when we fail.
That’s perhaps our only saving grace.
The one thing that our big brains give us is the ability to empathize with those less fortunate, although not everyone inherited the empathy gene. Once again, we’re witnessing the rise of those in power who seem intent on squandering precious lives. It turns out that life isn’t really sacred to humans. The ringleaders of torture and destruction may lead the way, but the masses tend to follow.
It’s always a question of just how far we’ll go.
For those of us who fall somewhere on the empathy scale, however, there is a longing to make things better. It’s a persistent dream of creating a life that elevates us above our sheer instincts. We fail, but we keep trying.
Maybe, if we don’t give up, we’ll eventually evolve into creatures that respect all life, but we’re not there yet.
Teresa is an author and professional myth buster. You can find her books on Amazon.
