The Tapestry of Humanity

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of humanity." To "rise above the narrow confines," it is first necessary to understand the humanity with which we need to connect. In working to try and understand humanity, one must first understand how the individual, society, and government work together as a human network. Determining what role the individual plays in society and government and deciding, based on this, what role government has in the life of the individual and in the operation of society is necessary before we can see the overall picture and spot the aspects that link all three together.

The human species has had a dramatic impact on the planet and on the life that resides in this little pocket of water and gas. Humankind, with its ability to reason, has leaped in front of the other animals and has begun shaping the world around it in novel ways. However, the same qualities that have served humankind's ancestors so well in the game of survival still reside deep within the genes of Homo sapiens. Humans are born primarily into an animalistic state that has little to do with good and bad and everything to do with staying alive and propagating the species. It is natural to be selfish, to be afraid, and to be suspicious of most other people. However, Homo sapiens' evolutionary history has bestowed the species with curiosity and a social aspect, and their large brain has given them the ability to think beyond the physical world, to communicate, and to make use of the vast arsenal of higher emotions they possess.

While deep inside each person is a primal urge to serve the self and no one else, altruism is born out of the social tendencies of Homo sapiens. The species has the ability to empathize with its neighbors, and in doing so can decide to sacrifice personal well-being for another person. Inborn selfishness and kindness are both derived from the same deep animalistic urges, and are not unique to humankind.

Some qualities are inherent within people based on the balance of selfishness and altruism in their lives. Thus, genes play their limited role in the construction of the psyche. Various psychological tendencies are predetermined, but the environment takes the body and brain the genes have created and subject both to the ravages of life. Experiences shape the way people act, and genetic tendencies pave initial behavioral processes. The environment plays a crucial role in creating the individual. It is a shaping force that changes or adds to the individual constantly, while genetic tendencies act as a preset that is expressed most of the time.

However, people are more than simple robots. While some programming is indeed in the system, and is both genetically and socially created, the key to unlocking the essence of an individual life lies in the ability to think and make decisions. Humankind is unique in its ability to analyze behavior, to categorize behaviors as right or wrong, and to live life based on these categorizations, or morals. People can deductively reason and learn from their mistakes. It is for this reason that people do not always act according to expectation: a child born into poverty who knows nothing but violence and terror can be saintly, even as someone with the best possible life, a childhood full of warmth and love, can become a monster in men's eyes. Personal choices, which can be gathered under the term motive, are the only criterion any one person can use to judge the action of another. Even then, it is difficult to judge the worth of a person or their actions, for the simple reason that morals differ from person to person, can be interpreted differently, and sometimes violate each other.

While it is impossible to override the deepest programming, human beings can use their programming, can alter it, can fine-tune it to suit themselves. Thus it is that people must be held accountable for their actions: a bad deed cannot be blamed entirely on programming since most people have the ability to control what they have been given, or at least to choose actions they can deduce by comparison to society to be right. There are many cases in which people do not have any control over themselves, or have only limited control, and so accountability must be determined on a sliding scale that can save these people from punishment that is unjust in light of their lack of control.

When personal accountability falls through in cases of mental illness or other similarly control-debilitating circumstances, it is up to society to be accountable for the individual. Society has to provide the individual with some structure to catch them when they fall. It is of dire importance for a group to take care of those who are in need who cannot help themselves: the tricky part is recognizing who is in need, who cannot help themselves, and when interference would be an infringement of individual rights.

A delicate balance must be fulfilled in a society that values equality between freedom and order. People must be respected as human beings, and human beings have certain rights guaranteed them. Individual rights guarantee that the treatment of people is uniform and equal. They lay out guidelines for authority to use when deciding which behaviors should be punished and which should not. At the same time, rights provide the individuals an envelope of safety to develop themselves within. As individuals use this protection for their own benefit, they also must recognize that just as freedoms and rights protect them, these rights also apply to others and should be preserved by each, in each, so that the whole stands efficiently. Individual freedoms and rights, when properly used and respected, set society up to reward social innovation and justify an environment in which the least control possible may be exerted over each person. Individual freedoms provide personal security and social stability.

This is not to say that order is not valuable in society. Order is in fact vital to freedom's survival. Chaos is not freedom at all, because freedom must respect the organization of individual rights to ensure that each individual is treated fairly. Some order must be imposed on society for the sake of preserving security and defining the boundary between personal rights and the rights of others. Order protects freedom, just as freedom prevents order from overstepping its bounds. A government is meant to preserve both freedom and order for society, by protecting rights and codifying a group's moral beliefs, so that individuals can attain their fullest potential.

Personal fulfillment is a higher-level human need, born of the desire of humans to satisfy their capacity to reason and think. As such, individuals should have the opportunity to fulfill their potential, insofar as they are willing to work for it. Nobody should be handed success on a silver platter, but everybody should be given the opportunity to work for success. In return, the individual owes the government for protecting that opportunity. People must repay society by holding up individual responsibilities.

The individual owes society certain responsibilities in order to be part of it. First, people must uphold just law as part of preserving and protecting social order. Next, they have to be able to contribute positively to the social fabric. Finally, people must push for the improvement of society. In this way, social order is preserved and bettered by the individual's fulfillment of responsibility. When this social order is upheld, the individual can live more freely. Freedom depends on responsibility, and responsibility must be fulfilled in order for freedom to exist and to endure.

Society is a delicate, ever-changing, intertwined fabric that must be kept up by the citizens that are a part of it. Government is a way of organizing the citizens, creating an environment for them to thrive in, and holding them each to the same standards while ensuring that each has the same chance as any other to fulfill themselves. The individual serves society, society forms the government, and the government protects the individual's rights in a circle of dependency and coexistence. Like the flag that represents them, the individual, society, and government are inextricably linked and interwoven into a single cohesive unit, the unit being one in which everyone must live together and interact. This done, the individual can, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., "rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns" and become incorporated into the tapestry made of many fibers and woven of many flags: humanity. Only then can the individual truly start living.

regrets

I sit in the cool green grass... just staring up at the wide blue sky, how it folds in on itself in the edges. Dingy gray clouds mingle with the puffy whites, drifting by slowly, changing shape, and I watch and watch as the whole circus tromps by. My mind is cartwheeling through infinity. Secret thoughts, so loud and free, emptying myself of the burdens upon my consciousness. Silence. Tears roll onto the dry grass. The only sounds are you and me and all the mistakes I've ever made. One can never be free... from the past. And so I count the clouds, one by one, living in the moment, forgetting, forgetting... the lessons are learned.

Forgiveness

Sweet, sweet forgiveness:
Hanging on the boughs of need,
So fickle in her true expression,
For without love enough she contains no worth
And with love overmuch, shame masks her pretty face.

Hand in hand she walks with retribution,
A lover's lane winding through an orchard,
The fruit of which is salty, for no trees are these
That offer up their valued wares:
They are only a living graveyard of persons wronged.

Forgiveness, yet:
She may be begged, or bought, or maybe derived
From the clinging of one victim to the criminal
Who, even in wrongness, is intermingled so with the former
That pride-wound becomes but a necessary trade for peace.

A promise she becomes, when given,
So even when jealousy stabs most unbearably,
Or anger wrenches a quick-tempered heart,
She whispers cool reminders into a reddened ear,
Of calmness, and patience, and acceptance.

O, Revenge!

O, Revenge!
Such a sweet song of Hate she makes,
And, moved at even the heart's slightest trembling,
Does make a game of the mind's finest dreaming.
No greater passion can be found in her desperation,
Not in love's paragonal depths, nor lust's secret screamings,
For she alone holds the key to promise and eternity,
Willing to bide time before unleashing calamity.
Dwelling within her puppets of flesh and blood,
She breaks their will, piling provocation atop jealousy atop pain,
Molding even her strongest hosts to perfection,
Drawing within them the blueprints of malefaction.
Finally, when the object of her existence is achieved,
She slips away, unseen but for the emptiness she leaves,
The vacuum an imprint of her consummation
Which proves to satisfy noone, and achieve nothing.

No Chance

In the beginning, there was a horn. A little sharp horn on an orange beak jutting from a scaly reptilian head. This head was not pretty in the least: It was wet, glistening from never having felt fresh air in its brief existence, wrinkly and squashed against an equally soggy, crumpled body nestling in a dingy grey, leathery egg. The horn worked like a scalpel, head butting the shell again and again from within, until finally the creature had sliced a hole large enough to wriggle, slowly and with much effort, out of. It let out a shrill screech when freed, and was alone in a nest of plant stalks, two additional eggs sitting like twin pearls. Soon its mother came, a small pterosaur, just in time to prevent her newly-hatched offspring from rolling its siblings out of the nest, as the young dinosaur was actively attempting. He issued an angry screech before realizing she had brought scraps of meat for his growling stomach. Hungrily, the winged newborn filled himself before settling into the deep sleep of one who has worked so hard in his efforts at making his way into the wide world.

When the creature awoke, he was once again alone in the nest, his mother presumably out hunting for his next meal. For a while he waited, screeching in an effort to expedite his mother's return. Realizing this was useless, he set to work pushing the egg of an unhatched sibling out of his domain. His brown-orange beak prodded the egg, scrawny chicken-like legs straining, wings outstretched for balance. The egg pushed up the slope of the nest, nearing the top before the young dinosaur lost his footing and the egg rolled downward once more, a Sisyphean futility that hit him in the head. He shook his tired body out, gathered strength, and pushed once more, this time getting results for his hard work in the form of the egg dropping to its demise on the ground below. The young dinosaur fell exhausted into the nest and napped yet again.

The plantlike bouquet of fresh fish brought the youngster into awareness. He snapped greedily at the second meal of his short life, enjoying the scents and tastes that were regurgitated for him. His mother settled into the nest, resting now between hunts. Mother and child watched the quivering of the last egg. The mother pterosaur had already lamented her other lost baby, smashed on the rocks below. Now she cared wholly for the health of her remaining spawn. The hint of an egg-breaking horn disturbed the eggshell, and several hours later a brand new dinosaur emerged, wrinkled and wet, smaller than the firstborn. The mother cawed, setting out immediately in search of food for her newest. The firstborn pterosaur examined his new brother cautiously, suspiciously, selfishly. In one moment of horror, he bit at his new nest mate, still tired and not yet dry. He snapped and bit at the runt, bits of his kin's flesh swallowed the same as the fish, until only useless remains were left, thrown out of the nest, pieces sticking to the rim as if unwilling to let go of newly acquired life. The little pterosaur sat, satisfied, his birthright fulfilled as he digested his brother, alone.

The blood-stained sun sunk on the ancient horizon as the young dinosaur sat, waiting for his mother's return. It was evening... twilight... dusk. The first star winked in the night sky, then another, another, and finally the mother arrived. She was injured grievously, missing a part of her left leg, scratched up, wings battered. She made squeaks of suffering, sounds the youngster understood immediately, instinctually. She was too hurt to notice her third son was dead and gone. The youngster drifted to sleep, her cries resonating in his head.

The brilliance of the new day woke the young dinosaur. He blinked at the brightness of his first sunrise, and noticed the absence of his mother. He knew something was wrong. He looked around, out of the nest, to see the meat being pulled off his mother's bones by scavengers who had found her, fallen out of her nest. The pterosaur sharply recognized his own frailty and hunger. If only his mother hadn't left for a hunt; if only he hadn't killed his brothers, he wouldn't be alone in this world, alone in his young suffering. He sat waiting, starving, alone in his selfish dominance.

Religion

My life at once was simple, pure and free,
Floating in the set ways I was raised,
Times when I swam, loose in such a haze,
Until cold reality imposed its fist on me.
I lost my faith, denounced its chance to be
Inside my psyche, whereupon it preys
On innocents who never chanced to see
The recklessness in misunderstood ways.
So I exclude the supernatural things,
But finding ME was just as hard as not,
For those who stay in lazy pointing rules,
(Not those for which religion truly rings),
Take easy ways to escape original thought.
I respect the true, but never the virus's tools.

Materialism

She's a seductive, sensual starlet,
A lifestyle of excess, indulgence.
Full scarlet lips, beckoning, passionate,
Cat eyes ravenous and dominating.
Like shapeshifting clouds, she looks down, aloof,
Windswept and conforming to whimsy breeze.
She's a fire, smoldering desire,
But burning, a ravenous destroyer.
Cheap, malleable plastic, transparent,
If we could only see through her wiles.