Cannibals

Human shall not kill human. It seems simple enough. But if not each other, whom? Or what? Certainly we've been anything but discretionary when it comes to killing, but nothing has quite compared to the special thrill of killing one of our own. We have evolved with a genetic predisposition toward eliminating those who are different than ourselves and have been blessed or cursed with an uniquely refined ability to find differences everywhere. We're just giddy with the desire to kill everything. In the beginning it was a way to ensure the survival of the species. We shared the land with several hominid species. One of us had to come out on top. At least one supposes that to be the case. We certainly believed it and did a bang up job of it. The last of the bunch to most closely resemble ourselves, the Neanderthals, have been gone for about 25,000 years now. Maybe we didn't kill them off. But I bet if we didn't, we gave it the old college try. Since then, of course, we've moved on to those who aren't quite so similar and, in the absence of those other great apes, those who are so similar as to actually not be like us, but are us. We've about done away with the chimps and the gorillas. We'll finish off the orangutan, too. But they're second thoughts these days. A done deal and therefore less interesting. We've gotten the taste for ourselves and will attempt to work our way around the wheel on that one in due course.

For some, it is easy. There are people aplenty who are so obviously different that hatred and vitriol are easily directed. Whites target Blacks, or anyone who comes in a shade of brown. Blacks may target Whites, or anyone who's less brown than they are. Everyone hates the Arabs. This one hates that one, on and on. Wherever there is an easily identified difference, there is hatred. But we don't stop there. We seek out differences. If there is no difference in appearance, we find one of belief. Religion is among the greatest of these imagined differences. Muslims hate Jews. Christians hate everyone else, and even each other. Buddhists, well, okay, I don't think the Buddhists hate anyone--but I'm sure they are hated by many. More death and persecution has been done at the hand of religion than any other. Shia and Sunni, Protestant and Catholic, Christian and Muslim, this tribe versus that tribe, on and on ad infinitum. Some of us, of course, have evolved even further. We have gone beyond the need to destroy others and have moved on to the evolutionary pinnacle of self-destruction. Americans are especially good at this.

What drives a species to a level of such self-loathing that it seeks to take down all life around it in a blind drive to conquer differences and spread the cancer of homogeneity? We see it everywhere. We travel to the world and expect everywhere we go to be exactly like the place we have just left. We move from the Midwest to the Southwest and the Southeast Northwest because we see something beautiful and so different from everything we've known. We then work diligently to replace native plants with those we left behind. We grade the earth around us in order to pave and build up everything in a cheap and tawdry imitation of the last place we lived. Within a few decades the only difference is the weather. But we're working on that one, too.

We no longer want our food to be regional and distinct--we strive to replace everything with the same flavorless, characterless meal options throughout the world so that we never have to deal with surprise or anything different than that which we are comfortably familiar. We like the security of knowing that we can travel anywhere in the world and walk in to the same sterile fluorescent-lit boxes and order the same meals-by-number that we can order at home. Anything less might taste of cultural acceptance, or strangeness, or difference and these are all flavors we cannot abide.

Our food has become tasteless, but by god it all looks the same. Walk into the produce department of the nearest nameless chain grocery and you will find hundreds of apples that look exactly alike. All of the potatoes and onions and tomatoes and heads of lettuce are identical. Our orchards might as well have the Photoshop logo on them. Take someone on a walk in the woods sometime and hand them a wild blackberry or raspberry and watch their reaction. Once you manage to convince them that it is indeed edible, they'll try it and their eyes will pop and they'll wonder what's in it that makes it taste so good. Oh, it must be the fresh air and being outdoors. No. It's called flavor. We've bred it out of our food in favor of uniformity. Wild fruits are ugly and different. Take the same person who loved that wild berry into a grocery store and put them between two bins of fruit, one wild and the other the product of selective farming. Which fruit will he or she pick? The bin where all the fruit is big and shiny and identical. Unless, of course, the wild version is inordinately expensive--then it might be bought as a luxury item. But that's a whole other issue.

What's to be done? Anything? Will our driving urge to eliminate all that is different--everything being us versus them--lead to our own extinction, the penultimate evolutionary end? Or is there a way out? There are pockets of hope, small voices in the wilderness calling for acceptance and restraint, diversity and change. But those voices have always been there and they have always been beaten back and held at bay by the stronger voice of human nature. But there are new tools out there that are making the world a much smaller place and allowing those small voices a chance to be heard. Like the song says, "It's a small world after all," but is it small enough to change?