Humanity Means Being Humane

humanity photo

Humanity means *“the quality of being humane, benevolent”, it also meansbeing kind, compassionate, understanding, sympathetic, empathetic, gentle and generous.

But weseem to have forgotten what humanity really means. To us, nowadays, humanity only means that we are human i.e. bipedal primate mammals.

Not only that, we ridicule those do have humane character traits and consider them impractical misfits. We think they are kinky little oddballs who must be humoured and treated with indulgent compassion for their hopeless and naive unawareness of reality.

We become inhumane when we appreciate and celebrate the killing of criminals by the State. And we are so drunk with bloodlust that we congratulate cops for murder and bay for blood, like hounds chasing game for our pleasure. And we reason with ourselves and justify this lust for vengeance and then we applaud killing and executions by the judiciary and consider it justice.

We seem to have a strong desire to kill. We have gone back to the uncouth times when killing was a spectator sport and we have become the bloodthirsty spectators who watch and cheer while battlers kill each other or are killed by animals in an arena.

We have lost our collective conscience and rejoice in murder by the State. We have become merciless, brutal and pitiless killers. We have become ‘the lynch mob’.

We have become hard-hearted and callous and we have lost our sense-of-values, our conscience, and our capacity for empathy and understanding.

We have lost our humanity when we prefer cruelty and violence to compassion, and when we prefer viciousness and hatred to sympathy and kindness to others.

There is no other explanation, or excuse, for our joy in State sponsored executions. And though killings, executions and assassinations are decreed by law; they make us complicit in murder. We participate in the taking of a life.

It’s time we take stock of ourselves and retrieve our misplaced understanding of the value of human life; attempt to regain our humanityby reaching within ourselves to recover our inherent instincts of compassion, and,recapture our lost conscience by respecting ourselves and caring for all living beings.

We can become humane by consciously not being cruel and hurting otherpeople, animals and our environment, and by treating others the way we would like to be treated ourselves, and by putting ourselves in others’ shoes and feeling their pain.

We can become humane again by regaining the generosity of our hearts and by being positive; by being compassionate; by not harming anyone or anything deliberately, and by understanding that all creatures on this earth only have one life.

  • Oxford Dictionary

Pratap Antony writes on ecology and environment, social justice and pluralism, management ideas and issues, jazz and western classical music and Indian classical dance.


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