Homo homini aut deus aut lupus (Erasmus, 1466-1536, One human being to another is either a divine being or a wolf).
Erasmus was so right when he wrote that man is the only real predator to man. Think about it, without wars, accidents, man-made mayhem, ecological or industrial disasters, not to mention inborn stupidity, mankind would fully benefit from modern scientific and technological break-through, and happily spread across planet Earth in numbers far beyond what its natural resources can sustain.
Nature has one goal only when dealing with living beings, from veggies to meat eaters, green beans to roses, sardines to whales, ants to elephants: REPRODUCTION! Nature wants us to multiply, reproduce our own specific way and spread to live another day! At the same time, nature has setup mechanisms to prevent one group to overcome another. This is your balance of nature, demonstrated by the existence of one or many predators per specie, coded life spans, natural disasters, or epidemics that come as the big equalizers for all the life forms that compete for the same habitat and resource – all but one!
Humans became earth’s main predator, a threat to everything animated, other humans included.
Fifty years ago, people foresaw a future of flying cars, automated homes, universal peace, love, and happiness. Do not laugh – I still have the magazines! Today, the “Doomsday clock” has been moved to seven minutes to midnight, indicating a higher risk of a nuclear confrontation, a new Cold war like era. This is progress – and instead of flying, our huge cars snail around in smog-filled traffic jams while we indulge ourselves in finger flipping exercises and devour junk food.
Furthermore, in nature, the weak, the sick, the old, the kinky, the cuckoo, the whiner, and the lazy, cannot survive. They are the first to go, feed other species, rot, turn to dust, and enrich the soil. Man changed that and thanks to progress, the human specie has been able to expand its average life span, and care for its most vulnerable or “disoriented” elements. Natural selection is gone and the natural elitist law of the “survival of the fittest” does not apply to us anymore.
For the past zillions of years, natural evolution kept alive the one able to reproduce and spread smart and strong specimens able to adapt to the ever changing environment they had been brought in. Only recently did men come down from the tree they were perched in (50, 60,000 years BC?). Only recently did men grow a brain and coded life as it should be, life according to the Homo Murphy’s law of evolution, as written in blood and blunders by Momo Sapiens: everything that should go wrong – will go wrong!.
So here we are today in the “Western democrazies” that currently carry the flag of humanity! We have replaced the un-sensitive elitist laws of nature by a semblance of political correct equality in front of our human written laws. We have replaced reproduction by sex, food for hunger by the pleasures of the table, common sense by lawsuits, work by entitlement, and fitness by fatness. That is progress – or is it? While the educated get smarter, they also get older and fewer, having the luxury to postpone reproduction for longer stints in college, ski trips to Aspen, a career and some retirement. So do the conservative married minority, vowed to extinction by those who want to cure the Western world from its white and Christian traditions. In the meantime, the poor and the less educated of the globe breed earlier and longer, only postponing reproduction for their own versions of WWF, or to wage war in a neighborhood country they will be able to loot, rape and burn to the ground. Do you really believe that we are getting any smarter as a specie? Do you believe that we are going anywhere?
Just look around you!
Two among the top movies for 2005 are “Borat” and “Little Miss Sunshine”. One is the scatological and sexually provocative tale of a moron taking advantage of nice people and the other one is the story of a short fat little girl that has been encouraged to attend a beauty pageant contest by irresponsible parents. Note that she has also been trained to do some pole dancing by a drug-addicted grandfather, the dead body of whom they drag along in a VW bus! Ah Ah – very funny!
A poor woman just drunk herself to death to win some electronic game, while “American Idol” started with its long list of pathetic human beings that are going to be ridiculed in public because nobody ever told them that they were bad singers.
Married people recently became a minority, and a majority of women live alone while homosexuality becomes mainstream and children are made “in-vitro” to prevent stretch marks and give every couple a chance, whether sterile, too old (65 years old last week, in LA!), too weak or same sex.
Most of our food has become fat free while we have become fat full and diabetics, and AIDS keeps on killing millions that have never heard of protected sex.
“Homo homini aut deus aut lupus”, he said, and yes one human being can also be a god to another… let’s see – so many outstanding role model like Brittney, the trailer park multi-married lip singing queen, or the drunks Mel and Ben. We also have the porn star Paris and the bone bag Nicole! We glorify the zillionaires who flash hybrid cars, stand against green house effect, ride the Global warming wave, and travel in their own jets (Nancy Pelosi is the latest one and she just got a bigger jet in order to fly home non-stop). We adore the Rap and Hip Hop gang bangers, the steroid enhanced wall of famers, the rotten or stupid politicians.
So many examples of stupidity, and such a short column! Maybe I need a FEMA trailer, and a government, something or somebody to blame.
What a trip! What an achievement for the monkey-looking thing that started us all!
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