Skip to main content

Confession

 


I have a confession to make. I have racism inside me. Also, sexism, greed, selfishness, lust. All the seven deadly sins and then some. Here is another secret: you have all of that too. It is human nature to look out for number one, to be selfish. It is human nature to be prejudice for your own tribe and against all other tribes. “Tribe” can be race, religion, social class, political party, country, school, etc.

What makes a person moral is not the absence of these feelings, since we all have them. What makes a person moral is your ability to set them aside, to choose compassion over prejudice and greed. It is the same with courage. What makes a person brave is not the absence of fear, but doing the right thing in spite of being afraid. In the words of Captain Kirk in the Star Trek episode “A taste of Armageddon” when confronted with someone telling him that they are all killers, he replies, “All right. It’s instinctive, but the instinct can be fought. We’re human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands. But we can stop it. We can admit that we’re killers, but we’re not going to kill today. That’s all it takes. Knowing that we’re not going to kill . . . today.”

I know that some people are born into a racist family. That makes it more difficult to feel compassion, to see the worth of others. But it is still a choice. The fact that you have bad thoughts and bad tendencies is not an excuse for bad behavior. You can’t say “I couldn’t help it.” You could help it. We all have a choice. We can give in to selfishness and racism, or we can choose to fight against it. Whatever choice you make determines what kind of person you are.

Some choices are not black and white. There is ambiguity in the world. It is not always easy to know what is the right thing to do. But when you feel prejudice in your heart, when you make a decision against someone just because they are “other,” that should be a red flag. That is your ancient programing talking to you. Go against that programing and you advance the human race one notch.

Star Liner

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Empathy

  Websters defines Empathy as: “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.” Empathy is what makes us human, though lord knows there are many humans who don’t seem to have any. A person without empathy is like a caveman, only concerned for himself. Selfish. It is a lack of community and by extension, a lack of the need for civilization. The person who lacks empathy can have a bit of community, but only with others exactly like himself. It seems like societies go through cycles of empathy and less empathy. Sometimes a single event can change the course of society. Prior to America’s involvement in WWII, the general feeling in America was not very empathetic. We had our own problems. We were still dealing with the lingering effects of the Great Depression, and had been for years. That kind of stress makes it hard to think of others. Hitler was slashing through Europe. He and his fol...
1 comment
Read more

All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu

My first experience with cyberpunk as a genre of science fiction was Neuromancer by William Gibson. Neuromancer was one of the early works that defined the cyberpunk genre. It was insanely influential. It won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award. But for me, it just did not resonate. I had a hard time visualizing the concepts. It left a bad taste in my mouth for cyberpunk. I mostly avoided the genre. Then a couple of years ago I read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson which is cyberpunk (although some people say it is a parody of cyberpunk). Whatever, I liked it. I recently picked up All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu and it immediately became apparent to me that this was cyberpunk. Julia Z is the main character, and I think this is going to be the start of a series following her. She is a hacker (hence cyberpunk). She has got herself in trouble and so she lives on the margins, barely making it. Then a lawyer asks her for her help. His wife has been kidnapped. The ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Polar Bears and Entropy

  Extinction is a normal part of the evolution of life on our planet. You and I and all individual organisms eventually die. That is the way of things. Entropy happens. Entropy is a word from the third law of thermodynamics that basically means: things fall apart. The natural tendency is for things to become less orderly as time goes on: things break down, things erode, things rust, things wear out. Entropy is a measurement of how fast that is happening in any given system. Individual death is a natural outcome of entropy.   But an extinction is where all the members of a species are no longer living. Millions of species have gone extinct over the lifetime of our planet. There are natural background extinctions that happen continually. But sometimes there are events that trigger mass extinctions, where vast masses of species go extinct all at once (all at once in geologic terms, which might mean over the course of hundreds of years). There have been 5 mass extinctions over ...
Post a Comment
Read more