A-holes and Insects – or Mother Nature Doesn’t Care If You’re a Good Liberal
by Charles WinecoffDecades before George Clooney began using “Darfur” to swat away the unfashionable nuisance of “Iraq,” the hollow eyes and distended stomachs of starving Biafran children gave America’s impressionable “me generation” a reality check during commercial breaks. Parents shook their heads and wrote checks. “We have so much,” went the refrain. “The world is so unfair.”
My pretty fourth-grade teacher, who taught us everything from math and history to a dash of entomology (study of insects), didn’t think so. One day, unprompted, she told her class of 10-year-olds that she wasn’t really concerned about the Biafran babies because mass starvation was just nature’s way of controlling overpopulation. (My parents were mortified.)
Margaret Sanger
Hard to fathom how, less than three decades after the Holocaust, any educated person could harbor such cold acceptance of the cruel suffering of fellow human beings - much less voice it (and to children, no less). But whoever said the human race is on a one-way path to progress?
It’s widely assumed that, in every moment we’re alive, we’ve reached a new pinnacle – of modernity, experience, knowledge, enlightenment – that we always move forward, never back. But what if we don’t? What if we’re fated to make the same mistakes (disguised with innocuous new names) over and over again? (more…)
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