If you asked me, I would say that this has to be the worst 5 months on record. Starting with the Newtown shootings in December, 2012, and continuing with the Boston Marathon Massacre, to today's manhunt for the second suspected bomber, you have to wonder if the Mayans really were right. Is the current cycle of our existence over and we're moving into a new age for mankind?
Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I feel that, despite the immense propensity for evil that some individuals seem to have, Patton Oswalt has it right. These individuals are only a small fraction of a small fraction of a percentage of humans on the surface of the Earth. Most of us have the desire to stand up for our fellow humans, to help out when these individuals surface to wreak their havoc, to spread their terror among us. Even if we are hundreds or thousands of miles away from the scene, people stand up together to do what they can for their fellow man.
Unfortunately, often, after all of the smoke clears, and the tragedy starts fading into the background, the "helpers" that people become in the moments during a horrible event like this, slowly start turning into "vilifiers." They start looking for what might have crossed the wires in the individuals who have perpetrated these events. Then, some of these same "helpers" come to resemble those who they hate...
Remember 9/11? As soon as it happened, the emergency responders in NY went into a collapsing building to try and help those trapped get out. In the weeks after, the skies were silent as planes all over North America were grounded, but the ground was buzzing with those who were going into NY, DC and PA to assist with the cleanup effort. As the cleanup began to slow, many of us started looking at the Middle East, and especially Al Qaeda, and some of us, including those of us who were "helpers" who had gone into NY, given blood, donated money or goods to the cause, started looking at Muslims with wary stares, as if at any time, they would pull out an Iraqi flag, yell "Allahu Akbar," and run us through. Yet, Islam is on its own, a religion that does not breed violence. If anything, Christianity is more violent than Islam, with the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the early culling of "heretical," Christian groups, or those that did not agree with Constantine's version that he accepted for the Roman Church. However, we still villified them and, to this day, there is still an air that Muslims are out to "get us."
Then, the Newtown shooting happened. In this, the helpers were the educators and the first responders who protected the children in the school. However, during the day, Lanza's brother reported that Adam had Asperger's Syndrome, a form of high functioning Autism, and was a loner. All of a sudden, people began equating mental differences, especially Asperger's, with violence, and worse, looking at those who had Asperger's as being ready to go off and kill everyone around them. I know, because I HAVE Asperger's. However, I was lucky - most of my friends and coworkers, those who know I have Asperger's, also know that AS does not make people violent. Something else must have been going on with Adam Lanza, since they could not see ANY violence in my eyes, nor have they ever seen anything in me but good intentions.
Another group which was vilified was gun owners. There has always been an extreme bipolarity in the US public when it comes to firearms. After Newtown, the anti-gun lobby began pushing for stronger gun controls. This was a natural reaction to a mass killing in which the perpetrator had used guns to conduct the killings. For months, the country was in the throws of gun control talk. Some states, including CT, passed stricter gun control legislation. However, some of these laws were passed so quickly and with not enough consideration, that they had problems. For example, NY's law did not make exemptions for police or National Guard members. CT's law will result in many gun manufacturers leaving the state (it didn't help that our WONDERFUL Governor Malloy wrongly called these same CT companies soulless entities that didn't care about the victims of their products, just about selling their products to as many people as they could, even the deranged and insane - WOW, way to support commercial enterprise in CT, Guv!).
Now, after the Boston Marathon Bombings, we have once again come together as a nation, and as human beings, to support those affected. However, those same helpers will want to find out who these suspected bombers are and why they did what they did. They will look at their upbringing, their similarities, who they associated with. And, when all is said and done, people will look at what made them alike to one another, yet different from themselves, to blame their misdeeds on. Be it their religion (Islam), ethnicity (Chechen), friends, whatever these two brothers had that was different than the average (pardon the expression) WASP in the US. And, THAT, is what people will focus on.
Unfortunately, people usually fear what is different. You can look throughout our history and see examples of this. Burning witches in Medieval Europe and hanging them in Salem in 1692, shunning those with leprosy and mental disorders, claiming they were being attacked by demons, people in other countries accusing Americans of being responsible for all the problems in their own country since we think differently. Unfortunately, this tendency to vilify those who are different is a direct result of humanity's social nature. We group as a coping mechanism. It was our ancestors' way of surviving as a family unit - looking for those individuals that had our traits and staying with them, since groups are stronger than individuals. Back then, might didn't make right - it made you SAFE. So our ancestors learned to socialize, to create larger and larger groups, looking for ways to keep the group together, so they focused on what made them alike. Unfortunately, if similarity made individuals like you, and thus good, being different must mean that someone was bad.
We have come a long way since then. We no longer need to protect ourselves from predators. We now dominate the planet, but this focus on "He's the same as I am, so I can trust him; he's different, so I have to fear (or hate) him," is still very ingrained in our very being, the very soul of humanity. Maybe that is what the Mayans meant. That the "Old Cycle" of our time, that of hate and mistrust for our fellow man because he/she is different than we are, is ending. Maybe, in order to survive the ending of this "Old Cycle," we need to move past this evolutionary vestige and learn to love our fellow man, to treat him/her as being the same as us and look past what makes us different. A member of the Homo sapiens species, the human race. We need to stop looking at what makes us different and, as I saw in a video at the school I teach at, realize that we all have a brain and a heart that goes "ba-BOOM, ba-BOOM." Jesus had it right, we need to love one another as He loves us, regardless of race, creed, gender, religion, mental differences, and so on and so forth. STOP the hate and be a "helper," not just in times of tragedy, but ALL OF THE TIME! Only then will we truly become a new people, a true HUMAN race!
Just remember, in any species that has as many individuals as ours, there are bound to be some individuals where the wires get crossed. However, it is our responsibility as FELLOW humans, to be "helpers" to them, not just to those who my be hurt by them when we don't help them appropriately. It is not our job to differentiate or to separate - leave that up to God (or whatever deity you believe in).
