When I was writing The Dead Side trilogy, I was contemplating how human beings turn on each other. (Spoiler alert: Zombies are not part of this story.)
Is it basic human nature to turn against each other? Or did our ancestors learn it through the struggle to survive? Or the struggle for wealth, power, or glory? Or is it a combination of two or all of these?
The human story has been filled with death and suffering, often caused by men who want power and to own women.
People have been slaughtered throughout the ages over land, over wealth, and, yes, over women.
And people have killed each other over religion. The early Christians battled each other because they couldn’t agree over the nature of Christ. Christian differences produced wars and slaughter throughout European history. When the Moslems began conquering large areas of the Mideast, southeastern Europe and North Africa, pagans were given a choice of converting or dying. Christians and Jews were considered “people of the book.” They had few rights and had to pay extra taxes for the privilege of keeping their faiths. Or convert.
Then we have the Crusades. The Christians wanted to reclaim Jerusalem from the Moslems. And they did, for a time. When the Crusaders first broke into the city, they slaughtered everyone they found, Moslems and Jews included, and possibly the odd Christian who didn’t run fast enough. On their way to the Holy Land, they slaughtered Jews in Europe. Afterall, why go to kill infidels hundreds of miles away when you have some conveniently nearby?
Today we have Russia trying to erase Ukraine from the map because Putin and some others don’t think it’s a separate country, as it was once part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Let’s forget the Ukrainians have their own language, customs, and history. And like their independence.
And Hamas and some other Moslems want to erase Israel from the map. “From the (Jordan) river to the (Mediterranean) sea” is the current chant. Nearly 1,500 Israeli babies, children, young people, women, and men were slaughtered October 7 and Hamas has vowed to do it again. All that blood simply because they are Jews. If they had been Moslems, no attack would have occurred.
I guess the Devil really is in the details.
(For those who question Israel’s right to exist, I suggest you research the history of the area starting in the mid-19th century.)
Jew-hatred and Moslem-hatred are still with us and show no signs of disappearing.
The trouble with prejudice is that it creates a worldview that has nothing to do with reality. People of the offending group are seen not for who they are but for whom they are believed to be.
I’m not going to get into all the stereotypes. It would take too long and be too depressing. If you don’t know them, it will be easy to research.
My point is this: Humans, at least most of us, have come a long way, but have an even longer way to go. We actually now display horror at other people’s misery. We may not do anything about it, but at least we’re shocked. Of course, our reactions are colored by our prejudices. The most recent example of that is all the people who have suddenly forgotten the horrors perpetrated on Israeli civilians, including infants murdered in their cribs and pregnant women shot in their stomachs. Yes, yes, the death of Palestinian civilians in Gaza is a horror as well. But it is a horror created by Hamas who has shown a callous disregard for their lives by starting this war and imbedding their fighters among those civilians in Gaza.
So, the question is: Can we survive our own stupidity?
Or as the comic Tom Lehr once said: Do we going “sliding down the razor blade of life?”
Comments