Humanity
: | : the condition of being human : | :
Staring down at my hands, I think about my humanity, the precious gift I was given at birth.
Is everyone human? Not to ask is everyone a human, but are they ‘human’?
When you watch people walk by you, can you feel their warmth? Can you see their hearts?
Can you sense the very presence that once made them human?
I watch as a small baby plays with a toy. She is human, she has her humanity.
No one knows her thoughts but her, yet she knows so much.
I look at my parents. They are grown and have conformed.
They are people in this world, they are known in society, but are they human?
I look at myself in the mirror. I think of all I know and I smile. Then I think of how naive I used to be,
believing in only what my parents told me, yet how big ‘my’ world was.
I used to imagine a world where I held all the power and I could do anything.... and I did it.
Now, that world is locked away in my mind as a refuge, a place to escape to when I have time. Am I still human?
Everyday, I go to a place where children are turned into adults, bent and molded into real people.
The humanity inside is beaten away by facts and numbers, by reality.
We are stripped of the very thing that makes us human, our individuality,
and turned into a person, a member of society ..... a robot.
I look down at my hands, hands that are scarred from adventures in a world not too far away;
hands that have helped others know their humanity. Am I still human? I want to think so.
I am holding on to the last of my humanity, my individuality, my gift, trying to be stronger than society,
to keep in touch with the world inside me, so I can say I am me.
Keep the last of your humanity, what they haven’t taken away.
Keep the last of your childish dreams close to your heart,
so you can still be the person you once were. Look at yourself in the mirror and know...
“There is still a world, behind those eyes, that no one has discovered.”
Discover it.
September 2, 2000
