In Our Darkest Times, We Humans Can Be The Most Destructive Species On The Planet

A Commentary by Doug Draper, Niagara At Large

Never mind locusts, great white sharks and hungry packs of wolves and hyenas. 

When it comes down to it – when we get tribal and let the darkest side of our nature drive us – we humans have proven over and over again that we can be the most destructive force on the planet. And our propensity to kill doesn’t seem to be governed by how intelligent or civilized we think we are either.

The smoldering wreckage of Flight 17 in east Ukraine among the most recent expressions of our capacity, as humans, to destroy.

In his book ‘The Nightmare Years’, chronicling the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, the late journalist and historian William Shirer reports how “with increasing fascination and horror, I watched Hitler crush freedom and the human spirit in Germany, the country of Luther, Kant, Beethoven, Goethe, persecute the Jews and prepare to massacre them, destroy all who opposed him, and drag this great nation toward war, conquest and destruction. To my consternation most Germans joined joyously in this Nazi barbarism.”

But this is most certainly not about singling out Germany, which has turned out to be a country less militaristic than many others these days, and which also has some of the toughest laws in the world against hate crimes. This is about the whole lot of us, collectively, as a species. A hundred years ago this August, 2014, those of us who still observe history that goes back further than our last Facebook entry or tweet we sent out some 20 seconds ago, may remember the beginning of a war that in a mere four years and three months, butchered, gassed and starved to death an unprecedented 8.5 million soldiers and seven million civilians. It is now mostly remembered as World War 1 or the First World War – the causes of which are still leaving many historians scratching there heads over how or why it got started, and for what purpose so many people had their lives so violently snuffed out.

As some of us may also recall, that war, once also called the ‘Great War’ or, believe it or not, ‘the war to end all wars’ by some hopeless romantics, set the stage for a second one that was equally as murderous and even more hideous in terms of cruelty it wrought. And there have been many more wars in between and since.

All of this warring brings us right up to the horrible news of this July 17^th, 2014, when, according to most of the evidence available in the days that followed, surface-to-air missile exploded a commercial jet carrying 298 men, women and children, including world renown medical researchers, on their way to an annual AIDs/HIV conference in Australia, over a war-torn zone in Ukraine.

This writer is not about to speculate on which warring tribe in that region is to blame for this murderous act. Who cares which tribe it is, quite frankly, since there is enough animosity and weaponry on all sides to kill many more than the 298 passengers and crew aboard that ill-fated jet.

The very act of shooting a jet full of innocent people out of the sky is enough to show, once again, what a blood-letting species we humans can be at the worst of times, when we are more driven by our tribal ties about where we get our bloody oil and whatever else we think we need to secure for our survival from.

Toward the end of World War 1, a Canadian military doctor, Lt. Col. John McCrae who, himself, did not live to see the armistice, wrote his timeless poem that began: “In Flanders fields, the poppies blow, between the crosses row on row. …”

Today, in east Ukraine, one might very well write that in ‘Ukraine fields, where wheat and sunflowers grow, bodies decompose among the smoldering debris of a jet, decompose row on row ….”

We humans have the arrogance to point to other species on this planet, like bears in northern Canada or dolphins feeding on fish off Japan, or deer feeding on vegetation in and around Niagara, Ontario’s Short Hills park, of being destructive nuisances that need culling.

Take a good, long look at the online images of body bags and blackened metal and plastic melting into the ground where sunflowers once grew and try denying that we are not the most destructive species on this planet.

It is well past time – for the sake of my 23-ear-old daughter and people her age and younger who have to live with the legacy of the things we have done to each other, let alone to the water we drink, the air we breath and atmospheric conditions that are radically playing games with our planet’s climate – that we come to terms with what drives us as a species to be so destructive. 

Why can’t we more often be governed by the brighter side of our humanity? Where is the vision for a better future? Why don’t we spend more of our energy and intelligence reaching for those?

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