What-up humanity?

It's almost easy to see why people stop caring about anybody else and just start to look after número uno.

The world fosters it.
The media fosters it.
Consumerism fosters it.

And sometimes giving a shit just doesn't seem to pay dividends - it isn't the yin yang we hope for in our hippy days.

Good people can live miserable, forgotten lives.
Bastards can live and die like kings.

The universe doesn't care. 

I remember hearing once that we are communists in our youth, socialists, then eventually conservatives in our selfish old age.
Nobody cares about the old, so speak your mind and take what you can get, that message suggests. 
Your every thought of freedom was folly.
Every aspiration towards a better, more caring world was pointless.
Lock the doors.
Don't trust the strangers.
Arm yourself.
If you don't you're a damn fool.

Looking at groups like ISIS it's hard to argue an alternative point sometimes.

Where are we going so wrong?

But I flew into LA a couple of days ago and it stuck me, looking down, how wrong that picture might actually be - how distorted.
Because when you see a big city from the air you see a vast swarm of humanity shoulder to shoulder.
Living together.
You do not see a battlefield.

We are far more successful as neighbours and strangers than we tend to give ourselves credit for.

There is, of course, violence going on in sad places, broken homes, within the desperate trajectories of myriad disfunctional lives.
But that is not the majority.
That is not the overwhelming experience - at least not in most major cities where there is no warfare.
Even in poverty people find humanity.

I falter sometimes.
I think I should keep my mouth shut, my head down.
That I should give up on humanity - this desperate, pointless strain of mammalian life currently dominating the globe.
That there is no rhyme nor reason, and I'd best just take care of me and my own in a narrow, selfish sense.
After all, that's what this world seems to tell us we should do.

But then I hear somebody laugh.
I see something beautiful.
I witness an act of kindness,
share an intimate evening with loved ones.
Meet yet another wonderful, sensitive, caring individual.
Feel the love of my children. 

It's NOT all cut and dried! 

It's NOT so simple!

We have an exceptional capacity for empathy, and it's there because it's a natural part of humanity.
It's real.
It's chemical.
It is a part of our evolutionary process - informing the angels of our better nature.

We should not ignore it, bury it and bully it into submission.

We should listen to the sweeter inclinations that whisper to us in moments of introspection,
and maybe - just maybe, y' know, once in a while - we should act on them. 

This is not a world of individuals.
Everything we have made we made as a collective. 
We need each other.
 
So I'm not battening down the hatches just yet.

I'm not a religious man, but I'm going to retain a little faith in humankind.
I'm going to choose to think there might be a better future possible, if we just listen.
If we don't give up, turn away, and stop giving a shit. 

Call me deluded, call me a fool, but I think you seem like good folk on the whole.
There must be more like you out there...