When we are children, our parents often try and teach us certain values.
To be honest, kind, understanding. To share our toys.
We are praised if we do, punished if we don’t – this teaches us to be good, well-rounded members of society. To be good citizens, when we grow up. Good people.
However, the adults – politicians who tuck their children up in bed at night with words from bedtime stories about cheaters and thieves that never prosper – don’t seem to hold these values themselves.
When the toys aren’t toys but land and water and food and oil and money, they do not share.
When honesty is to be honest with a nation, with the world, about their mistakes and shortcomings – they are deceitful.
When kindness means sacrificing the comfort of their luxuries, kindness is no longer a virtue.
When valuing human life and peace comes at the price of excess, human life is worthless.
How dare you teach us kindness when you allow children to die of starvation and dehydration in Kenya and Haiti and India and so many other places.
Do not lecture your children about necessary virtues when you allow families to die in their homes in Gaza and Syria.
Do not lecture about acceptance when people are slaughtered for who they love or the color of their skin or the God they pray to.
Our world is broken. We do not seem to care about those outside of our immediate circle of experience. We are numb to human suffering, to children dying, to the destruction of life as people know it because it is not OUR life.
I am quickly losing faith in humanity, and I wonder if human nature is not just to destroy.
Selfishness and greed and indulgence and ignorance will be the end of us.
Chloe xo
I talk too much 