“For better or for worse, we are human.”

It’s not an excessively fabulous movie, but somehow ‘The Invasion’ starring Nicole Kidman is still stuck in my head. I’m not attracted to the mother-son storyline, rather the chilling truth that what makes us human is what makes us both brutal and kind. You can’t do away with one without killing the other, they are inexplicably inseparable. You can’t kill emotions because obliterating the bad destroys every other good thing that comes along with it.

You can’t expect a perfect humanity because humanity alone cannot be humanity without its atrocities and it’s inclination to make mistakes, deliberately or accidental.

So you see it makes me think of how funny it is that we judge people when we all have that duo nature of good and bad. Do we have the right? it’s like a group of monkeys grouping together deliberating how to treat another monkey who’s gone against rules they all sat together and decided was the ‘right’, ‘ethical’ or ‘religious’ thing to do. The same judge, the same jury, the same passer-by, all could have done the same thing as the accused when put in that position. They’re all monkeys, all equally vulnerable in the same ways.

We could have been born with another skin colour, another set of beliefs, another sex, another personality type, been fat, scrawny, pimply, gay. We could have been in a position where we felt the best thing to do was steal, abuse, or something stupid. But we never think to put ourselves in another’s shoes. We never look beyond our first impulse or the popular gossip or our own noses. We all tend to want to feel we’re better off, and a million insecurities, deep-seated emotions fight our consciousness to the choices of discriminajavascript:void(0)
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But if we took away all emotions- wouldn’t that solve the problem?

Oh wait, then we wouldn’t be human.