Rescue Journal

nice guys don't finish last.

Carol  ·  Sep. 13, 2017

i think the hardest part about being human is the constant battle....
to be good, to be kind.
our greatest enemy is within us..the selfishness, the fear, the craving greediness of having, of getting, of being something greater than we are.

we are just an organism, a living organism among hordes of other organisms.
and we were given the gift of potential. the potential to be good and kind.
sometimes we use it, sometimes we share and spread it if it suits us at any given time. but oft times we choose instead to be thoughtless or careless or destructive in how we live our life.
and we like to find excuses, we feel vindicated if we can offload the blame for our moments of darkness when we really should feel shame.

it is the word "but" that gets in our way. "but" allows us an excuse to weasle away from honest insight's pain.

this is the problem...when we learned to speak, we learned to tell ourselves lies.
we fabricate fairy tales to avoid judgement of how we chose to live our lives.
and the potential became instead of a gift, it became the horror of mankind.
when we kill hundreds of thousands of innocents and proclaim it is the will of god, when we sneer at the homeless person and tell them to go get a job, when we sit in the safety of entitlement and judge others as not good as us simply because their lives are hard..it has to be their own fault in some way....we partake in the poisonous feast of someones pain.

we are a species craving of power, and we gain power by climbing higher up the ladder and looking down on the rest. and if they are rocking our ladder, we must take them out. if they block our view we must make them go away.

all is fair in love and war...well... really it is not.
might means right....again we are wrong.
i work hard, i pay my taxes and therefore i deserve....what? more than our neighbor? more than the old man in the tattered coat? more than the black, brown or purple person wanting to immigrate to a safer place with more ladders to climb? more than the single welfare mom with 7 kids who by the way was kicked out of home at 13, has a grade 5 education, was repeatedly raped by her step father and can't afford birth control?

we made this world...the entire history of the human race has been one of sticking it to someone else. of walking over the weak ones, of shaking sticks or nuclear bombs at the strong...at pushing other races and religons and species towards extinction just to get what we want.
and we say...wait a minute..that's not me! that's someone else!!

really? every day i can find something that i did, said or thought that wasn't helpful, wasn't respectful, wasn't compassionate, wasn't nice.
every day i could have been better. i could have done better, i could have been more understanding and kind.
its a battle every single day. for every human on this planet who wants to be more than just a broken or maimed or mutated casualty of the human race war.
we just cannot accept that we really aren't all that special from the rest of humanity...we are born, we live, if we are unlucky, we bleed, and then we are gone...forever.
we turned this planet into a garbage dump of discards and despair. we let our insanity poison the planet and our own souls.

and now we have to live here, in a world deafened by the screams of those lost in 100,000 years of brutality, generation after generation, year after year..
the spanish inquisition, the burning of witches, conquests leading to multitude genocides, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, human and animal slavery, child poronography, gays beaten in the streets or murdered by the state, women raped, soldiers blown apart by smart bombs, domestic animals whose every breath, every moment of life is helpless, hopeless, wild animals choking on plastic, hunted for trophies, dying because of habitat destruction.

what we have done up til now wasn't so great...maybe we could each try a different way?
being a race of assholes hasn't worked out so well, maybe a race of nice folks can do better?

nice guys don't finish last...its just that nice guys never actually finish, they are in it for the long haul, there is so much work to be done.

Comments

Anonymous

"every day i can find something that i did, said or thought that wasn’t helpful, wasn’t respectful, wasn’t compassionate, wasn’t nice.
every day i could have been better. i could have done better, i could have been more understanding and kind.
its a battle every single day."

At the end of every day I need to stop and reflect on my day. I need to examine what I did and my motives for what I did. Without this i have no way of knowing how to become a better person. No way of doing any better the next day.

Penny

Yes, the world is in a bit of a mess right now and I agree with a lot of what you say, Carol. However, human beings can also be (and often are) compassionate and capable of enormous acts of self-sacrifice and love. Whenever there's a natural disaster in the world (earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes) it's amazing how people step up to help others. Maybe that's the secret, we need shake-ups to make us realize what's important in life. I see so much kindness and caring around me, and it seems there's a ground-swell of people finally changing their priorities. Guess it's just going to take time before we finally get it right.

Marianne

Very well said, Carol, and definitely important for us all to ponder deeply.

Willie

Thank you for reminding us of the hard truth. Even if each of us can only do a little bit once in a while - it does help!!
I believe it does. . .