I Get It

I read a story online this morning about some neighbors who helped the police search nearby woods from dusk to dawn to find an elderly woman with dementia who had wandered away from home and was lost. She was found.

I read a story online this afternoon about a good Samaritan who ran to the scene of an accident and reached into a burning car to pull out an unconscious driver and save her life.

I read a story online tonight about a couple who was on their way to dinner when they saw a puppy stuck in a drainpipe. They worked for two hours in the cold and rain to save it.

Humanity can be amazing, except

over fifty-thousand children a year are victims of sexual abuse,

and one out of six women and one out of thirty-three men are raped in their lifetime,

which is to say that every sixty-eight seconds, another person is sexually assaulted,

and all of that is just in this country.

The numbers vary depending on the study, but they are always staggering.

The way that some human beings treat others is beyond my comprehension. All abuse seems senseless to me, but maybe I’m missing a point, or something.

Okay, this isn’t poetic. I get it,

but what I don’t get is why it is so damn hard for so many people to just be friendly human beings all the time, just friendly would be fine.

I don’t expect people to be saints, not even close. I get it. Such an expectation would be too much to reasonably ask of anyone, even a saint.

I’ve failed an untold number of times in my life at not being better than I could have been. I’ve given in to urges, acted selfishly and inconsiderately, and been prey to my impatient and demanding mind too many times to count, or even imagine, but I never crossed the line into brutality of any kind.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not looking for some relativism of “kudos to me” as an award for not sinning as badly as I could have, or for me not being the worst sinner in history, that’s not what I am getting at, although I’m not dead yet.

I’m just saying that hatred and violence and abuse and fury are a whole other hellscape of savage madness that human beings knowingly perpetuate on this planet and excel at passing on from one generation to the next. Sorry, kids.

Not a day goes by without a headline highlighting cruelty of some kind. New victims are born every day without knowing what awaits them.

Sin is sin, and all of it originates from the same darkness that resides hidden from the light within us, and we crawl and we creep and we stumble back and forth across the line between good and evil, or good and not so good, usually making it back to the light with only minimal scarring, but sometimes there is more, and often there is regret, while for some the return doesn’t happen at all, or is delayed till rock bottom, as their actions and thoughts lurk deeper and deeper into the sin side and their eyes get more and more accustomed to the lack of light and more and more enslaved to some addictive comfort in the darkness, in the distraction, sinister or not, and as the days and years pass, it gets harder and harder for them to plot a path back to the light, if even desired.

You get it, right?

“Take heed,” they say, “for man was made with just as much capacity for evil as for good.”

Free will, free will, a poison pill, or our only chance at salvation?

I am happy tonight. I am sad tonight. I am smiling. I am crying.

Do you get it?

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© 2023 Randall Snyder