Tabor City Tribune

I ADMIRE THE HUMAN RACE

Copyright 1951 • Book-of-the-Month Club, Inc.

I admire the human race. I do, indeed. Everybody is busy running us down, these days, for the mess they say we have made here and there and everywhere. Pshaw! That's short-range stuff, a worm's-eye view of our world.

Over the marching and abundant centuries, we haven't made any mess. Far from it!

We have done and are doing a better job than anyone has any right to expect. We're all right!

From the beginning, we found ourselves alone in a vast universe, and not only alone but the only thing on this planet which could realize its loneliness. We realized it, gave it a good close look, and then turned our attention to making something practical and useful out of an unprecedented situation.

First of all, we found ourselves a Light, a God, and we got a sense of direction, a goal to work toward. This was pretty clever of us, if you think of it carefully.

We proceeded to set up standards for our living together. Early in our experience we made the revolutionary discovery that gentleness and kindness were more practical than brute strength. No other species has ever found that out and used it as a model and practical code of conduct.

We have in actual fact no one we need answer to, beyond ourselves, and yet we observe our ideal standards in remarkable degree. We are honest and trustworthy one with another so that it is the exception, it is news, when we commit a theft. We are decent 99 per cent of the time, when we could easily be vile.

With silence and mystery behind us and ahead of us, we make up gay little songs and whistle them, and our feet keep jig time to them. We look life and fate in the eye, and smile. I like that, and I admire the people who do it.

Alone among all living things, we have discovered Beauty, and we cherish it, and create it for eye and ear.

Alone among living things, we have the power to look at our environment and criticize it and improve it.

Finding it necessary to live together by the millions, we created ourselves governing system covering vast geographical spaces. Now we actually have the thrilling and terrific idea of a world government, a global government to bring justice to white and black, to Eskimo and Afrikander, rich and poor, not because any tribe is powerful and can exact justice, but because we have conceived and created the ideal of justice and plan it for all men. This is great. This is not the act of a little animal, or a mean animal. This is possible only to a great animal.

We think in global terms. We inhabit a star, and we know it.

Finding that we have to work to stay alive, we work with ability beyond imagining.

Out of the earth we take food, and improve that food year by year; we take heat, and light, so that darkness which lay upon the face of the earth is dispelled by man-made light. We enjoy all the myriad products of our unparalleled ingenuity.

Every morning the necessity for the day's work faces us. And we go and do a day's work, with an overall average effectiveness and perseverance that is amazing, considering many of the jobs.

Of a persistence, a daring and ingenuity impossible to surpass, we find ways to move easily under the water and through the air. Now we speculatively eye our neighboring planets. It should astound no one if man one day begins to move among these planets.

How shall I not admire such a creature?

Daunted by nothing, his horizons constantly recede, the territories of his possession and use expand and expand.

Whenever he comes to an impassable obstacle, an apparently final barrier, he goes to work at it and, in due time, surpasses it. If he has limits, I do not see where they are. I do not think he has limits. I think he is a child of the universe who inherits eternity. I think he is wonderful, I am his devoted partisan, and I am proud indeed to be one of him.