Other
blogs have gone the other direction—posting information in order to convince us
that nature isn’t scary at all and the world is really a wonderful place full
of beauty and mysticism. Such articles include things like the top 10 largest
holes in the ground, largest lakes, most strikingly-colored aquatic life, etc.
A news article covers the “ten
scariest animals in nature,” an article that seems to debunk the scariness of
some animals while illustrating that others are scarier than we thought.
Popular images when one Google
searches “scary nature” include deep-sea life and tremendous storms, along with
the occasional image of nature eating something like a street sign.
…serial
killers…
…and
drug addicts…
Still
other blogs like to simply post information with no hidden agenda. The best
example of that, in my opinion, is a video series by zefrank1 on YouTube called
“True Facts About...” The videos themselves are highly amusing and great fun to
watch, yet they still cover facts that are, in fact, true (imagine that!).
However,
how often have we taken the time to look at humans as a creation of nature?
Religious people like to argue that we are created by an almighty, omnipresent,
omniscient, benevolent, just, jealous, vengeful, mysterious “God”, when the
truth is that nature “created” us, just as it created every other mammal,
reptile, amphibian, sea creature, and plant on the planet. The truth is that
evolution is a fact, whether you decide to believe in it or not. The greater truth,
as I have come to know, is that humans are by far the scariest creatures ever
to come from nature.
“But
what about the box jellyfish?!” one might ask. The box jellyfish minds its own
damn business and won’t hurt you unless you mess with it—intentionally or not.
Now, let’s focus on what I’m actually saying, please.
Humans are the only creatures to
unintentionally cause serious harm to the environment. Wikipedia hosts a lovely
list of nuclear and radiation accidents and incidents (actually the name of the
page, if you want to look it up yourself), organized so that you can jump to
one category in particular if you’re so inclined. Their list of nuclear
meltdowns is one that I find particularly compelling for illustrating my point.
Images of Nuclear Accidents:
Those
are accidents. Those images and the
lists on Wikipedia don’t address what humans do deliberately to destroy the planet. A lot of people think
explosions are cool. The Myth Busters
are famous for blowing stuff up in nearly every one of their episodes. I have a
number of friends who think explosions are really cool-looking; these are also
friends who advocate firearms and are great fans of what Americans like to call
“air power”. Now, don’t get me wrong, explosions can look cool… but…
I’m sure we’re all aware of the
attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Here’s a look at those explosions.
Nagasaki and Hiroshima
Those
are pretty nifty, aren’t they? Nuclear explosions are famous (or infamous) for
their mushroom-shaped clouds and, conveniently, Google has a nice collection of
images in stock! But this post isn’t about the explosions. It isn’t about
weapons or war or firepower of any kind. This post, I’ll remind you, is about
the scariness of humanity.
Consider,
for instance, the aftermath of any
given explosion. If you’ve seen images on the news after Hurricane Katrina, you
may have an idea. But Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster—not something done to the planet by humans.
We agreed that those explosions
looked pretty cool, didn’t we? Sure, we did. We like looking at pictures of
explosions. What we don’t like looking at is the aftermath. Take, for instance,
the aftermath at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.
The
rubble and people made homeless don’t look like much, especially when placed
side-by-side with pictures of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The woman’s
face, even, could be worse, couldn’t it? Images like these should be far more
compelling than they are, but radiation itself is invisible (unless it’s
glowing in the dark). We can’t see the danger floating in the air that we as a
species created. What we can see, however, are the effects of that danger.
You may
still be asking yourself, “How are humans the scariest creatures on the
planet?” to which I respond, “We destroy everything.” Not only do we destroy
the planet in every creative way we can imagine, we destroy each other. People
are all too happy to be terrified of being bitten or eaten alive by piranhas or
sharks. What they don’t seem to be afraid of—as they should be—is an attack
from a fellow human being.
The
irony of this is that humans attack people far more often than any other animal
in nature. It’s in the news every single day—a school shooting, a serial killer
on the loose, sexual predators possibly living in your neighborhoods and
preying on your children, a mother who has killed her baby, and kids who have
killed their mother. Why are we not more afraid of humans? Humans are
unpredictable, dangerous creatures! They come in all shapes, sizes,
appearances, rendering judgment by appearance impossible!
One
terrible fact that I, and many others I know, have come to notice is that
people are immensely guilty of “bystander syndrome”—an inner voice that tells
you, “Someone will take care of it,” accompanied by a feeling of
non-involvement and non-responsibility and, perhaps, a twinge of guilt—whenever
they see something that they know, ultimately, is wrong. Take, for instance, a
man falling down in the street and not a single person stopping to help him for
well over an hour, then by the time someone finally does stop, it’s too late.
He’s dead. Or, perhaps there’s a situation you see at a bar where a man is
hitting on a woman who is clearly drunk; you know the woman doesn’t want
anything to do with the man but you do nothing to separate them and ultimately
he rapes her.
There
are many things we tell ourselves as bystanders and we are all guilty of
bystander syndrome at one time or another. In the situation with a man falling
in the street, we may look at his shabby clothing and unshaven face and think
to ourselves, “He’s probably homeless,” or, “If he’s really sick, I don’t want
to catch his disease,” or, “I don’t know anything about him and I don’t want to
put myself in any kind of danger.” We are conditioned from a very young age to
think, when we see a stranger, “You never know who someone is.” The problem
with this conditioning is that this inner talk is almost always negative toward
strangers. We don’t stop to offer aid to a homeless man on the sidewalk because
we don’t know anything about him. He could have been a largely successful man
before he lost everything due to circumstances outside his control. Or, as we
are more prone to assuming, he could be a drug addict just looking for his next
fix. In the situation with the man and woman in the bar, we are likely to think
to ourselves, “It’s none of my business,” or, “I don’t want to fight that guy,”
or, “I don’t know them; I shouldn’t get involved.” We are conditioned from an
early age to think that what others do is none of our business and we should
never get involved in the affairs of others. We put blinders on, stick our
heads in the sand, and mind our own business for fear of altercation with
another person, or fear of judgment.
More
than those things, however, we laugh things off that are not funny and should
not be made into jokes. The word “rape” is thrown around so often now that
fewer and fewer people take it seriously and therefore are less likely to do anything
to prevent a rape from happening—due to the idea that it “isn’t a big deal.” It
is a big deal. It’s something that the US military is focusing on very heavily,
along with drunk driving, to eliminate—and, with it, bystander syndrome, so
that those around people who are drinking or making advances on drunk women are
not driving drunk or taking home unwilling partners.
Bystander
syndrome may well be the scariest trait of humanity. After all, while there are
rapists, pedophiles, and murderers out there—and usually you can’t identify
them by looks alone—think of this: There
are more people than all of those criminals combined who sit back and do
nothing while these things happen. Think of Jeffrey Dahmer’s neighbors, who
smelled the rotting corpses of his victims and heard the sounds of his tools
while he went about cutting them into bits—yet who did nothing to investigate.
Some called the police, yes—and good for them for doing so, I’m certainly not
saying they shouldn’t have—but the police, after very brief questioning, went
on their way and thought no more about it. Or—even worse than Dahmer’s
neighbors—think of the two cops who went to his apartment with one of his last
victims, a teenage boy, after finding said boy trying to run down the street
naked with blood on him from being anally raped—a boy found by two girls who
called for help and knew something was wrong, girls who did something and were not
bystanders—and after brief questioning and absolutely no background checking,
the cops left the boy with Dahmer in his apartment and went on their way.
Bystanders are literally the reason Jeffrey Dahmer got away with murder so many
times.
What I’m trying to say is this:
Rapists of all kinds…
…might scare you. They might make you nervous. But I have to
ask you…
What
about your neighbors who will stand idly by and watch a drive-by shooting
destroy your house? What about the people filling a restaurant so that nobody can
get in without a reservation, turning away as you choke on a piece of your
food? What about the hundreds, perhaps thousands of people in the streets,
walking right by you as you fall over, coughing, in desperate need of medical
attention on your way to the hospital—and not a single person stops to ask if
you need help while you collapse to the ground and cough out your final breaths
among specks of blood?
It
isn’t just about what humans do to destroy the planet. It isn’t even about what
humans do to actively destroy one another—such as with war.
It’s about the fact that we do nothing to stop it, and we are doing
more and more of nothing every single
day.
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