Swimming To Shore, or Drowning Together

I saw a post this morning about powerful scenes of human beings cooperating in fiction and film. For instance, INDEPENDENCE DAY, which for the very first time, to my knowledge, a film actually presented the notion that humanity would pull together if aliens attacked…and backed it up with multi-cultural, multi-national and multi-racial imagery. Never, ever, seen that before.

Then the writer went on to express how the COVID problem could have been handled so much better if we’d just been sensible, if there hadn’t been such horrific denial of science. I agree.

But what caught my attention was the number of people on the thread who said things to the effect that their trust in humanity has been damaged, or destroyed. And…to be honest, I kind of feel that anyone who says that either doesn’t know history, hasn’t been paying attention, or doesn’t know themselves very well. My post was this:

“The REASON those scenes are so powerful is because we know they are relatively rare. And the problem isn’t “out there” in other people, it’s in our mirrors. Unless you’re one of the vanishingly rare people who don’t fight against themselves, who have ALL the aspects of their personalities working together, we all have walking, talking, personal examples of why it is so difficult to get groups to work together…right inside our own heads and hearts.”

How can you look at FB threads, and the denial and fighting over trivial things, the actual GLORYING in oppositional thought that is such an…