We are not yet human, just Homo Ridiculous – a lost cause

IT IS Don Quixote, in disguise, reporting. I have read every damn newspaper, listened to people from all walks of life, all the driven drifters through the layers of imploding sand that never comes to a substantive full stop.

As I understand it, the Muslims, the Jews, the Christians will at best remain polite to the strangely other that spiritually keeps paddling upstream. The ANC will remain a split marriage between cultural traditionalists and 21st century protagonists pleading reason to be a decisive beacon.

One-dimensional capitalists will continue making money, hailing it holy success and thanking a most profitable and honourable God, and some of them will even go into sewerage plants to pray the extra billion.

And yes, apart from tactical displays to profitably sway sentimental ways of mentality, they will not, no, they will not give a damn about children lost in the swamps of neglect and society’s layered moral decay.

Suffering people will desperately keep turning to charlatans promising them easy ways of redemption while the consequences of simplistic thinking will gradually sink the possibility of a substantive future. The middle class will remain nameless. Schizophrenically keeping to dovetailing a pleasant way of captured life.

We, the species that they call homo sapiens, will not start to think without psychic, cultural, subjective clamps growing day by day more into the essence of our brains, next victim to be our ingrown souls. And yes, we will find creative ways to rectify our way of being, philosophically, psychologically, religiously, to be superior to all the others that we have to graciously, or forcefully, if they don’t comply, cope with.

Mr Editor, this is a lost cause. We have lost it. We struggle to spell it. The sense of compassion. The sense of life’s inherent complexity. The sense to sense the existential anguish in faces daily passing us by. The brutalised bodies. The moral sense in making a stand to confront the many forces of subjective force and selfish regard that we paint to be a balanced and grounded pretty picture.

We are not (yet?) human. We are not homo sapiens. We don’t run into life’s dungeons with empathetic reason and reflection on the layers of history that have at bottom line the sadness of first-hand, second-hand, third-hand, neglect and cruelty. Who was that guy that coined the term homo sapiens? It should have been homo cruelitas. Yes Sir, homo cruelitas. Print our shame. Let the children be dressed in such applicable printed T-shirts and sell it for a profit.

Can we step up? Can we escape the horror that we keep creating? No Sir, we keep ignoring the compassionate and holistic tenure of reasoning. To incorporate the otherness of others, the reasoning that allows other forms of reasoning, and thus to become soulfully much more than before.

We, though, keep to our ways of onesided bar-fighting. Homo Ridiculous,I suggest. Look at the articles in spent papers and the sorrow that drowns in dark humane-less alleys. I rest my case. We don’t want humanity. We want a frivolous home-grown profanity. We just love home-fires. We don’t deem it spiritual arson. No, we really don’t. Wim van der Walt Bellville