Fighting Our Demons

Some days, it’s easier to believe in the demons than others. This is one of those days.

If I had written some of these events a week ago, they would have seemed like pulp fiction. A police officer shoots a man in a car with his girlfriend and 4-year-old, and we see the aftermath immediately as she livestreams the video. A sniper attacks the police, and a robot takes him out. Today, these things are news. They’re real.

But it’s important to remember that despite what we are seeing today, despite the constant drumbeat of pain and suffering and violence, that we are living in a time where we are killing fewer of one another than ever before in human history. We are actually more peaceful than we were even a century ago.

That’s not to say the problems we see do not exist. It’s just that we feel them more. The greatest accomplishment and the greatest weakness of the Internet is that it has become our nervous system, and it is bombarding us with signals from places we didn’t even know we hurt.

Like any other animal, when we feel pain, we recoil, we snarl, and we even lash out.

Most of the time, we look for something or someone to blame. As usual, Kurt Vonnegut said it better than I can: “It is a tragedy, perhaps, that human beings can get so much energy and enthusiasm from hate… Hate beats pure cocaine every day.”

That’s the primitive wiring in our heads, the part that hasn’t had an upgrade in maybe 250 million years. These are the instincts that lead us to distrust each other, to bare our teeth, to attack. That’s where those demons live.

But even on days like today, I refuse to believe that we are that limited. We have put our feet on the moon. We have built cars that drive themselves and everyone walks around with a supercomputer and miniature TV station in their pockets. We have tamed and destroyed diseases that once tangled us in knots of pain and death.

As far as we have come, I refuse to believe we can be beaten by prehistoric demons living in our primate brains.

I know social media outrage is cheap and easy, but I felt I needed to say this today. Yes, there is still so much to do, but I believe we can do it, because I look at how much we’ve done already.

There is a reason children and adults alike are wearing  Superman T-shirts and mobbing the theaters when the latest Marvel movie hits. We are looking for heroes. We are waiting for someone to save the day.

I believe it’s up to us. I believe our capacity for heroism is greater than our capacity for horror.

I believe in the future, and that we will get there together. Because we already are. I believe we can be better than this, because we are better than this.

Today I choose to believe in the angels. They’re inside us, too. We just have to remember it.

(I wrote a slightly different version of this post on my Facebook page, and decided to publish it here as well.)