There Is a Way Out — Choose Humanity Over Convenience
Humanity — do we ever truly think about it?
Do we look around and see life in harmony with one another and with the earth, or merely a tired imitation of living, stitched together from convenience and indifference?
I am old enough to have watched generations fold and unfold like pages in the same worn book. I see not progress in every corner, but the fruit of our fears and our ignorance ripening too quickly into bitterness. We have grown adept at renouncing conscious existence: outsourcing responsibility, embracing routine that numbs us, and calling it practicality. How easily the temptations of weakness find one another — small compromises that multiply, filling our world with challenges far from humanity and progress.
Yet there is a way out, and it begins inside each of us. That way is simple in name and demanding in practice: Humanity. Wake up. Tend to yourself as you would tend a fragile garden. Tune your choices by a new instrument: pass every decision through the prism of humanity.
Ask not only “What benefits me?”
but “What harms another?”
and “Does this build or unmake?”
Learn to recognize ignorance in its most corrosive forms — the arrogance that refuses facts, the cruelty dressed as tradition, the seductive rhetoric that pretends to courage while hollowing out conscience. Do not become the useful idiot of manipulators or the servant of beasts in human form. When your neighbors do not mirror your values locally, go broader: find friends in movements, in social groups, in public forums where humanity is not only compassion for the weak but also insistence on justice for the oppressed and accountable consequences for aggressors, whatever their banners.
Strong, just states and resilient international institutions are not miracles — they are the labor of responsible, educated people who refuse to let history’s darker habits pass unexamined to the next child. We have drowned knowledge, progress, and mercy too many times in our own blood. The potential to build a civilized society exists now, but it is stifled by atavisms passed down by ignorance.
So take up what is yours by nature: reason, empathy, and courage.
Harness human potential — in your hands, without exception and without excuses.
Author: Michael Kaplan
To encourage people to think, understand, and find solutions in the fight against ignorance, while promoting knowledge and inspiring personal and collective responsibility for a more enlightened and just society.
