LIFE!

We have people griping about politicians trying to "give our money to people that aren't doing anything to earn it".  We have people griping about democrats trying to cancel student loans and make vaccines for the novel corona virus free to everyone.  We have people griping about homeless people making their towns look too ugly for tourists and griping about people trying to make them wear masks for a stinking "cold".

We have a lot of griping.

But what do we all have in common?

What do we have in common with our fellow countrymen (and women--for years, I thought that women were included in that, sort of like the editorial "we".)  

What do we all have in common with the people in other countries?

Life!  We are all alive.  We are all just trying to live our life; to survive as best we can.

And, we also share that with all the other mammals and birds and reptiles and amphibians and invertebrates and plants and fungus and bacteria and viruses.

Humans are not the only life.

We have been acting like we are the only life for several millennia, but acting is-well, it's acting.  Charlton Heston, Groucho Marx, Alanis Morrisette, George Burns and Morgan Freeman played God.  They were acting the part of God.  It didn't make them God.

And acting doesn't make us the only life.

Humans are just as dependent upon the other life on this planet as we are upon the sun.  

I remember a student in class arguing with the teacher about photosynthesis and plants and how important they are to human survival.  His stand was that they only ate meat and wonder bread.  His family was fine, so the teacher was wrong.  

Unfortunately, we have a lot of people with this attitude, or with the worse one, that God made all that other life for us to do with as we wished.  Some focus on good stewardship of the land, but seems to mean exploiting every plant, animal and mineral that can make our life easier.  

We spew insecticides, plastic waste, petroleum fumes, and manufacturing toxins into our air, land and water.  Destroying whole species while ignoring the plight of our poorer human lifeforms.  

And we gripe.

We gripe a lot.  

We ignore signs of intelligence and emotion in other lifeforms, thus making it easier to destroy them for profit.  It's like not naming our food but on a grander scale.

It's time for us to examine ourselves, not for signs of life, but for signs of humanity, of compassion, and humility.

We well-off Americans are not alone on the planet.  Everything is not ours to use.  

We can't survive without all of us, human, animal, plant.

But we can eliminate ourselves long before the sun goes out if we don't figure out what is actually important.  

LIFE!