Its hard to do sometimes. You stand over the person who has tried and almost succeeded to knock you down and all you want to do is rub their face in the dirt. You rationalize the act; if I hurt them they will regret their actions so much that they will not do this to others, but you know that you just want your pound of flesh.
We all know that it is better to be nice than it is to be mean and we all understand that being mean is easy. Earlier this year I posted about how Homo Sapiens killed all other types of humans and this makes me kind of believe that being mean is almost in our nature.
It feels good, it is natural so why not do it? Well violence and meanness is not the answer. Violence is temporary and seems to only perpetuate more violence. There was this game we would play. I was in middle school and every time we saw a hill or a mountain we would rush to the top and begin to push each other down the mountain to claim the title as king of the mountain. The king gets the satisfaction of being the lone survivor at the top however he or she is of course lonely and has to watch their back always. Species thrive in diversity and community yet here we are still playing king of the mountain.
The average CEO makes 324 time more than their employees, king of the mountain. The average politician makes just under 200000 a year while the average employee makes 50000 a year. We have truly applied nothing we learned in school to our society.
Last year charitable giving has increased by about 2% so, maybe we did learn a little.
Lets continue to learn and be nice.
“Violence is not the answer, it doesn’t work any more. We are at the end of the worst century in which the greatest atrocities in the history of the world have occurred… The nature of human beings must change. We must cultivate love and compassion.”
Martin Scorsese
Violence among nations seems to be on the decline however violence between people within the nations is on the rise The reasons for the violence’s line up on seperating lines like gender, race, religion and political affiliation. The lines that the violence fall on seem to be part of the rationalization for the violence. It is ok to harm someone who is not like me is the thought but that is wrong at the end of the day we should strive to just be nice
The Corrigan Encore 