Fear, Being Human, and Perseverance

            Fear can be a tool of control- fear of communists, socialists, labor unions, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, the UN, other sexual orientations, gender identities, other races, teachers, professors, or vaccines. Fear of people does not solve problems. People are people first, and any other qualities are secondary to being human.

            How do we define being human? Humans have great language abilities. But there are people who have lost the ability to speak due to a stroke, or who never learned to read. They are human. You might appeal to our DNA, but a piece of human DNA is not a human either. You might appeal to our fantastically complicated brains, but there is a condition called anencephaly, in which an infant is born without a telencephalon, which is the part responsible for our most human behaviors. Infants with anencephaly are human too. Any quality that might be uniquely human, some people lack that quality and are still human.

People can be kind, caring, and thoughtful. They can be mean, cold, and cruel.

I’m irrationally optimistic. I’ve told a couple people recently that I’m an optimistic nihilist. Not moral nihilism, meaning that right from wrong doesn’t matter, but nihilism meaning focus less on destination, and more on the road.

            The story of human history is a story of perseverance and doggedness while suffering. Enslaved Africans, oppressed indigenous populations, antisemitism, patriarchal oppression women, or violence against people because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Yet people keep putting one foot in front of the other. Some people ask when they suffer, why me? Why not you? These oppressed groups, they had to find ways to enjoy life. People who suffer have to find ways to enjoy life. Choosing love, optimism, and enjoying life in the face of oppression is an act of radical resistance.

I plan to just keep enjoying life. As President Lincoln said, “Right is might.” As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”