How Inconvenient
Can't outlaw evolution
How inconvenient it is that the story never ends. That every leap forward brings forth a back flow, that all humans must needs confront the same learnings, yet never absorb nor advance in tandem.
Evolution, so subtle, so subliminal, many actually claim it doesn’t exist. I can imagine the battles, scattered too far for comparison, between those who chose to build shelters out in the open and those who knew full well how stupid it was for them to venture beyond cave dwelling.
I picture a child abandoned as fodder for the accident of being born cleft-lipped. What must their last thought have been as some coyote rectified their disfigurement, too ghastly to be allowed to exist?
How gut-wrenching it must have been to abandon the safety of home and routine and venture into the unknown, all at the behest of a stranger who upset the hierarchical apple cart for who-knows-what reason.
Just picture a mother’s teeth gnashing and breast beating when her incorrigible son pushes from shore in a flimsy, man-made vessel, bound and determined to fall off Earth’s edge, so obvious on the horizon.
Ignaz Semmelweis, the first person to wash their hands before treating a wound, was considered a lunatic, a madman. Washing his hands? What a crazy notion!
And so it continues. For what is life if not to learn, to push the collective knowledge forward millimeter by millimeter with the occasional, once in an eon centimeter advance?
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz will win the 2024 United States presidential election if for no other reason than we are at that once-in-an-eon centimeter moment.
It won’t stop those who refuse to believe huts are better than caves, or those who fear the challenges of freedom more than the boundaries of vassalage from clinging to their comfort zones. It will alleviate no flat-Earth terrors. People on the tail-end of this era’s wave, who have not yet evolved enough to recognize human beings are a single species with varieties as colorful and fascinating as every other species, will cry and protest and try to force a turn back.
But huts are better than caves, medicine is better than leeches, motorized vehicles better than pulled wagons, and tolerance, equity, and coexistence are better than insularity, divisiveness, and conceit.
End of philosophical musing. Feel the joy.