Too often with the human condition we pride ourselves on having a wealth of academic acumen where we forgo our emotions for stoic objectivity. Such a thing does not exist, but we continue to weigh our intelligence in ways that alienates us. We measure a person's worth through letter grades, through IQ tests, money and superficial means like skin color; never, as it seems, by the content of character. We humiliate people and abuse them with our words if they fail to meet the standards we set. We think of ourselves to be better, but sophistication in a falsely believed civil nation is a depthless guise of gaudy designer fashion we too proudly wear to show "solidarity."
We detach ourselves from what makes us human - from what allows us to empathize. We see people not as fellow beings, but as categories different from us. By dissecting people's race, gender, and sexual orientation to define them in rigid and simplistic terms we condition our minds to view each other as objects, as things. We have created a climate of superfluous privilege for too many power hungry individuals. These individuals have become the foundation of an institutional system that oppresses those it has chosen to violate.
But the system is broken because we are broken. Something inside of us craves to heal what is wounded, and rather learning to love we demoralize one another. The sheer volume of which we venerate the love for greed, wrath, hatred, and total disregard for human life in search for existential dominance turns us into violent, brutish creatures.
Kindness, love, compassion, and generosity - these things cannot be measured on a point system or valued as an ascribed status. They are proven through action and feeling. One cannot smother people with intellectual prowess and expect that by having the ability to retain information like a computer, you are the smartest - most enlightened - person in the room because you are not. To feel and express these sentiments does not require a university degree or a posh vernacular because they are part of a celestial existence, and we are the stardust that moves within its cosmos.
I have always maintained the belief that love will heal us all if we can only see ourselves as one entity. We are of the same atoms, of the same matter and energy force that animates this life. We are tiny molecules in a galaxy far reaching than our minds can go, and the ball of light that ignites inside of us when we are born is the flame that keeps us warm. Do not extinguish that warmth, for love lives in the embers of our souls, and it is the only remnants of who we are as people. We should strive to be better in relation to what we are for the universe demands it so.
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