Other Living Beings

Bumping up against each other the nearly 9 billion people inhabiting this sphere are very vulnerable to natural disasters. Napal, in the news today, is still counting their dead, 5,000 so far. Our Earth calls the shots : will the next disaster be from in the Earth, above or on it ? Plague, starvation, and dehydration are always hovering close to the surface of life. Over and above these catastrophes awaits the atrocities attributed to the largess of the ego in man. Man seems to have evolved over the graves of previous beings and, while evolving, his numbers continue  to expand reaching beyond 9 billion looking toward 10. 

It almost seems Man needs to kill and maim his fellow beings in order for him to believe, in his thinking, that he is a member of an anointed race. Genocide, it's called when it shows up randomly throughout civilizations and we define it, in modern day, as just another act of war. Frank Bidart, in his poem I just read, "The Forth Hour of the Night",  penned these two sentences : "He looked around him. Human beings live by killing other living beings." Words attributed to Timujin  son of a Khan, who was killed by the Tartars, years later Timujin at 39 became elected The Great Khan of all Mongolia. Killing, under Timujin's orders, became fast and furious as his armies swept throughout a quarter of the the planet's surface. He was Genghis Khan.

Has humanity improved or has just its weaponry ? Or do we , over and over, relive what is ingrained in Man's psyche ?

Ronald C. Downie