Musings on topics of small or large importance. Especially partial to subjects that include baby boomers, public figures, friends, Corporate America, the Denver Broncos, NASCAR, my previous home towns of New York City and Columbia (Maryland), stupidity (mine and others'), diets and health and who knows what else!

Sunday, August 07, 2005

On Being Sub-Human

What does it say about us as a society that the United States, Britain and Japan sent people and equipment that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars (millions?) to save seven crew members of a Russian mini-submarine? It says that we're a caring people, we humans. It says that we'll go to extraordinary lengths to save a handful of lives that are at risk halfway around the world. And thank God for that.

But at the same time, every day we murder each other, we attack each other in war, we abuse the people we supposedly love in dozens of ways.

A couple of years ago, when the film We Were Soldiers came out, I watched the brutal war movie in a jam-packed theater in Manhattan near a couple of Viet Nam war veterans and their families. As the merciless acts of one soldier to another went on in one gory scene after another, the macho vets openly sobbed. I did too, but mostly I was hit by how cruel we could be to one another. How on earth can we do that to a fellow human being? And how can the same human race react so forcefully and passionately in two such diametrically opposed ways? I truly don't understand.