The Anatomy of Humanity

By Renee Shay, Harvesting Thought

-explore-

We human beings are complicated organisms among other countless living creatures here on planet Earth.  We are as insignificant as a drop of rain, but as important as a hurricane.  Over the continuum of time, we matter little but in the span of our own lifetime, we matter tremendously to those other organisms we come in contact with and with whom they contact.  Look no further for evidence of this than the impact of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Pandemic that killed millions across the globe in a few short months.

All earthly creatures have great powers for survivability though undeniably is the fact that we humans are unique in our reach beyond meeting basic needs.  We move our bodies with such microscopic precision, never having to give a thought to how our own neurons work unless we are sitting in a classroom studying ourselves.  Synchronicities with each other exist among all species so complex that we are now just beginning to scratch the surface of understanding them. 

We have studied anatomy before we hit adolescence and some of us have studied a multitude of anatomical disciplines as we went onto pursue higher education.  We know that we humans are the most evolved and complex organism to have ever existed on our planet.  We learn, adapt and manipulate our environment to meet our basic needs but our prized specialty is our advanced intelligence, we are the aliens of Earth.

With all the knowledge of our world passed down through centuries, you would think, because you can, we would get pretty good at being human.  You would think we had just about every problem solved by now, we, who are so smart, so evolved.  Just as we learn that a virus can learn, adapt, and mutate, we create medicines to counter its effects, but that does not mean we can annihilate it, yet.  We continue to explore, challenge and expand, yet we continue to fail and return to our most basic instincts of survival when pressed. 

For some of us, our thoughts, feelings and actions can go an entire lifetime unchanged.  How is that some do not adapt when we have the greatest capacity to learn beyond all other creatures here on this planet?  Earth is over 4 billion years old, and we know that because we are smart enough to create math and science to help us figure it out.  But some of us never seem to evolve beyond a caveman mentality or a fevered man-made religious fanaticism after only a few thousand years of our existence?  Why?

-challenge-

On July 4, 1997, the NASA Mars Pathfinder mission with a female flight director at the helm, Jennifer Trosper, is credited with rolling out the first land rover onto another planet.  The “Sojourner” was dedicated to Isabella Bomfree, a pioneer of women’s rights and an abolitionist, who was also known as, “Sojourner Truth”.  You would think that us humans have come pretty far when it comes to seeing women as equal to men when we have seen a white woman leading a mission to Mars while dedicating it to a black woman who advocated for women’s rights and ending slavery, have we not come far?  We certainly did not need Elon Musk to take us there. 

We are capable of going to another planet over 127 million miles away, yet we think we need laws to govern a woman’s body in the 21^st century?  We, who are capable of policing ourselves, yet who still need better policing to protect black lives?  Having a woman lead us to Mars, having a black woman freed from years of our white man-made slavery become a part of that legacy, how is it that we are still challenged by women’s and black people’s rights?  Getting to Mars seems to have been the easy part.  [NASA.gov article, “NASA Marks 25 Years Since Pathfinder Touched Down on Mars”, July 27, 2022]

No religion or form of governance should have ever had a right to enslave another human, but they did and still do.  We accept pulpit leaders enshrined in robes who have done harmful things to our children because their laws restricted their most basic instincts, so they preyed upon our youth, and we called them holy?  They kidnapped our children and tortured them into our white ways, and we called them holy?  We can debate, we can argue, we can create a court of humans wearing black robes whom we call supreme but that does not make them so.  We have a dark history where men and women hid beneath white-hooded robes, carrying torches, terrorizing and murdering in the dark of night.  Robes hide nothing. 

Throughout my lifetime there have been attempts to imprison me with religious dogma and laws of governance, but they have never held me hostage to their cave-man mentalities.  They have no right over my mind and body.  I was always a skeptic, sitting in the pews on Sunday morning, never truly believing or buying into what the Catholic church was selling.  I thought that all these people sitting around me are so fearful and desperate, they are willing to do just about anything to feel life is more than what it seems. 

I live my life as a woman equal to a man, embodying my own version of yin and yang.  A woman who can love whom I wish, who can create fire, hunts and gathers, protects herself as well, and sometimes better than some men she has known.  I live my life at the boundaries edge of laws mankind.  As I type this sentence the Microsoft program tries to correct my use of the phrase, “laws mankind.”  I kindly press “ignore” and move on as that is another choice I get to make for my own.

-expand-

As Darwin proved throughout his life’s work, survival comes down to variance.  Why should gender or race be different, it technically is not.  There are differences between us all, but I fundamentally believe the right to exist, to be treated fairly, to be able to make our own decisions and to have access to earned abundance should not be debatable.  With the scarcity of resources on Earth, this belief in equality will unfortunately wax and wane over time.  If you are on the right side of liking the unfair, liking the fact that the white man rules, then you have fared pretty well with the minuet of the last few thousand years and counting.

We can sequence our DNA but that does not mean we can eradicate most things that fight to destroy us.  Life is a battle for constants.  Constantly fighting against bacteria and disease while constantly fighting to survive before we are left to decay and rot, returning to a dust of nothingness.  Even before we experience our first breath outside the womb we are fighting for our survival until we pull our last breath from our bodies.  Just as the sun rises and sets, so too goes life and death.  You cannot shake it either, they are both necessary and inevitable, never meant to last forever.  They need each other to have life in the first place, existence and not.

Accepting that there will always exist a force more powerful than us that will eventually destroy us, what then, what do we do with the time we have?  We fight, we learn, we adapt, we evolve, of course, but why so slowly in some areas but not in others?  Why is it we can build defenses against an unseen virus and save millions of lives through understanding our human body, through understanding how many feet we need to stand away from each other in order to avoid droplets from each other’s mouths that may be contaminated with a virus that could kill us or someone else we personally will never come in contact with, whom may be living across the world on some remote island, but we cannot fix conflict between ourselves? 

Our biases toward others can come from actual experiences but most often they are absorbed by a wind of unseen forces that we breathe in and out each day.  They are neurological responses to the world around us, rushing in and out of our brains without any thought to where they actually came from or where they are going, whom they may touch, whom they may harm.  They have developed, been nurtured over time and reinforced each nanosecond of our existence by the very nervous system that allows us to stand in front of a refrigerator, blink our left eye, twitch our right pinky and kick a foot out to slow an egg we just dropped from our hands to the floor all the while thinking about what to make for breakfast.  Can we stop an egg from hitting the floor and breaking with our foot?  Our unconscious instinct is to try. 

The complexity of a virus that we cannot see with our eyes but is capable of destroying us is no different than a bias.  We find ways to understand and combat a virus, to get along in the world with it while it exists unseen yet, here we are, we still cannot figure out how to get along with each other.  Are we to accept that as human beings our DNA will forever be polarized, divided, black and white, day and night, good and evil, sane and insane, mean and kind, wise and stupid, all jumbled into no particular order, a cosmic rainbow of chaos and nothingness?  Will we allow humans to continue to adapt, manipulate and mutate, like an unstoppable virus that spreads across the globe, into some other version of ourselves, perhaps better than what we could possibly imagine on this day, I hope so.