Humans: Beasts or Savages?

"When you stare into an abyss for a long time, the abyss also stares into you."
Frederick Neitzche.

(October, 08, Yangon, Sri Lanka Guardian) Friends, the photograph shows the body of a Buddhist monk killed by the Nasty Junta in Burma (Myanmar). It is not a pretty picture but what it clearly shows about the human race is even less pretty.

Of all the religions on earth, the Buddhist religion is the most peaceable, the most genuine. It is based upon revering all forms of life, upon hurting nothing and no one, upon caring, upon doing good, upon simplicity, frugality and humbleness.

Recently, Burmese monks bravely led a peaceful protest in Burma, a protest advocating democracy. The Junta of Army Generals, as the protest swelled, responded with brutal military force. Unknown numbers of deaths occurred but they are certainly in the thousands.

However, all over the world, terrible injuries and deaths like that shown above are occurring every minute: in the Palestinian Territories, in Iraq, in Sri Lanka, in Afghanistan, in Sudan...in places we don't even know about. As well, men, women and children are being imprisoned, tortured, murdered, raped, sodomized, having limbs chopped off...

Please, I don't want to stare into the abyss any longer, to think about the immutable human condition, to consider the full extent of what humans the world over (Americans, Israelis, Australians, British, Burmese, Sudanese,Sri Lanka etc) are doing to other humans, what it means, what it says about us as a species!

Sometimes our true reality is simply too confronting, too hideous, too much to bear!