Were I to cast a pebble into the proverbial pond of the population, and the pebble had a unique marking, then 1 person would have the pebble. However, that 1 person, having seen the marking, can now replicate it. Is the pebble—one amongst many now—still unique?
Were I to cast a pebble into the proverbial pond of religions and it landed in a random one, would that make that religion the right one? When other religions catch on to the stone, wouldn’t they make their own unique stones and then too be the right one?
Were I to speak in a manner to a person by which they felt offended, have I only offended them or also their family? Has the offense stopped there or have I too offended their friends? Would it then stop or also somehow continue to perpetuate when the spoken manner was used at a specific individual and under specific circumstances?
Were I to look at the diminutive Earth in the proverbial vastness of the universe, with it being more than a sextillion in comparative size, how important is any of the above? Are we just living in the chaos of what we call law?
We hate without merit. We often don’t respect boundaries under the guise that someone else started it and therefore rules no longer apply to you because you were somehow wronged. As if the rules should so easily be bent or broken solely because we feel a certain way. With almost half a million rape victims a year in the United States alone, the likelihood that we, our parents, grandparents, or further back were the byproduct of such an act and are alive today due to a heinous crime is probably low but possible. Should we all line up in front of a firing squad to pay for the sins of people who not only died hundreds of years ago in some cases, but also who had no contact with our generation and values? Perhaps then, the law shouldn’t apply to the families of those rape victims and they can run rampant and hurt, maim, or kill us as the progeny of those atrocious events. Under the premise that we hate without merit, an affront is made to one person. One who speaks to a crowd fuels the crowd, but the members of the crowd have a thinking brain (regardless of what group mentality in psychology would say).
We tend to fall prey to our hate and inability to see that in a world full of individuals, no one knows anyone. A snowflake is different from the host of them that falls, but we call the group snow and never really mind the peculiar and unique nature of the individual; we just bunch them all up and just call the grouping of snowflakes snow. A lot of this is true in society today. When imparting ignorant judgment on others, whole groups are targeted or portend to have been the target of, and what ensues is blatant chaos. A person who has been hurt should hurt, yet when we see that has happened we should, and often do, have a system by which perpetrators are brought to a justice system often agreed upon by the populace. Philosophers have argued that to be good there is no definable criteria as it lies with the person providing the judgment and as such no amount of good would suffice in a person’s past if a wrong has been felt by someone, despite the initial rationale for the event that garnered the judgment.
I don’t mean to say that letting people get away with horrors is a bad thing or a good thing for that matter. A horror to a good person can be theft, but to a murderer a horror may be heaven. Today I toil in my erring by acknowledging mine as well as the ignorance of the ignorant.
