Gongol.com Archives: February 2025
February 5, 2025
A 10-year-old boy was one of the people injured by flying debris when a medevac airplane crashed in Philadelphia. He was in a car with his father and siblings, and as his father attempted to steer the vehicle to safety, the boy shielded his little sister. Despite taking a fragment of metal to the skull, he has regained consciousness and is on a path to recovery. ■ In the hospital, the boy asked his father, "Daddy, did I save my sister?" (The 4-year-old was OK.) Those words, though, are enough to arrest the full attention of any sensible adult. ■ A lot of people profit, either directly or indirectly, from trying to convince other people of the bad in the world: Conspiracies, criminality, and countless forms of malevolence. And it is true that there are evil people among us (a few), as well as people who really aren't motivated by evil but who may succumb to evil temptations (a few more). ■ But most people -- a supermajority, really -- are out to do the best they can for themselves, their families, and their neighbors. If we were truly drowning in evil spirits, humanity would have gone extinct long ago. Most people are like the heroic 10-year-old, who sense a responsibility to protect those more vulnerable than themselves. We express this sense in different ways and with different levels of self-sacrifice, but it's a thread that comes within human nature for most of us. ■ It's a thread worth remembering. There's no way for all of the imagined evils to be real, even if a few of them really are true. Our species is cooperative and social by nature -- anyone who violates those conditions through stealing, selfishness, or antisocial behavior is a threat to us in our natural state. If we expect that most others are trying to do right, even if in flawed or incomplete ways, then we can sustain hope. ■ A 10-year-old trying to save his sister is a hero, for certain -- but he's also an exemplar of what's most normal in all of us, rather than some strange outlier. If his story seems well outside the norm because we're consuming too much media that makes the deviants among us seem like the normal ones, then it's time to recalibrate our information diets.
