Hope

I had always wondered why most people had a morbid fascination with disaster and destruction. Thousand will gather to watch the demolition of a building. While the coroner cleans up the remains of a body from a car accident people will drive by slowly, itching to glance at the deceased. When executions were public, you were considered unfashionable if you weren’t watching as the guillotine sliced through a criminal’s neck. As long as our species has been around we’ve flocked toward all things morbid. Even the religious will say the hooker deserved her death as they crowd around for a closer look at her freshly discovered corpse.

I suppose the generations born in the last forty years can claim they have a reason for their macabre minds. Death, destruction and all things gruesome have become so main stream in the world that we’ve become desensitized to such things. These days, when we drive past a fatal car accident more often than not we’ll think, tsk, tsk, they shouldn’t have been texting. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to have lived in simpler times, where such things were taboo and altogether kept unseen. Words like murder, rape, killing, drugs, heart failure and cancer were spoken in hushed tones as if saying them quietly would keep such things away from ourselves and those we love.

Then I realize that, despite how desensitized we’ve become, we’ve also come a long way from those days in terms of science, medicine, education, and human rights. Although there are still people clinging to the ways of old, people who think that interracial relationships shouldn’t occur, that evolution just simply doesn’t exist, women should remain in the kitchen and that men should only be with women and vice versa, the majority of people have opened their minds to such concepts and have accepted it as the norm. Certainly we still have more to learn, more to accept and more to grow, but in contrast to how we used to be, we’ve become so much better.

Most of the time I think the human race is without hope. All that we ever hear about is death, destruction, and advances in violence. However, sometimes people surprise me in their kindness. Just the other day I was visiting my grandmother’s grave, something I haven’t done in too long. Once again I just didn’t think about bringing flowers for her. While I sat there, talking to her, missing her, and feeling guilty for not brining anything, I was approached by an older woman. With nothing but kindness on her face, she handed me a bouquet of flowers, no doubt extras left over from what she brought her own deceased family member or friend, and told me to leave them on the grave I was visiting. “No grave should be without flowers, especially on a holiday.” With a smile and kind eyes she walked away and to her car.

It amazed me that anyone could be so kind. It was true that I was already in tears from how much I missed my grandmother, but new tears flowed because of that kind woman. They were tears of happiness and hope to the world. Though part of me still dreads the future of the human race, a new part of me is excited to see how far we will go, to see if we’ll evolve past the horrors of now.