Beware

 Try as we might, people keep dying. Not quietly at home like Champ Biden, but in horrible ways that were both unexpected and unnecessary. Which makes me wonder about us as a species. It makes me think of Cornelius reading from the Sacred Scrolls at the end of Planet of the Apes: "Beware the beast Man, for he is the Devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death." This scene comes just prior to Taylor discovering that he hadn't left Earth at all. He had just looped forward in time to discover that "they" had blown it up, leaving intelligent apes to take over. 

Then we are left to wonder if we are truly on a course of mutually assured destruction, whether by nuclear war or simple attrition. Back in 1968, Rod Serling wrote that ending from a dark place, but I would suggest that it came with the seed of hope that we still had time to correct our own trip through time, learning to care for our fellow man and making the world a better place where humans and apes could live in peace.

We are currently shooting at one another with such reckless abandon that nuclear weapons may not be necessary. Road rage incidents like the the human who jumped from his car and fired at the car whose driver had made a gesture after being cut off on the freeway. The human did not hit the offending owner of the finger that made the gesture, hitting the six year old child riding in his mother's car. By some very crooked reasoning, we can assume that this somehow solved the problem. The mother will probably never make another obscene gesture when cut off in traffic, and her son has been eliminated from even the possibility of following in his mother's footsteps.

And if you've hung around here long enough, you might be expecting me to make a plea for gun control that would keep guns out of the hands of humans like that. Or the ones that would shoot a cashier for reminding them about their mask policy. Or the ones that would pull a gun on a Starbucks barista for getting their order wrong. Those fit our definition of unexpected and unnecessary, but it seems as though guns are no longer truly necessary to this equation. 

Last week during a Pride Parade in Fort Lauderdale, a human drove a pickup truck into a crowd, killing one and injuring another. Authorities were quick to point out that the driver was associated with the Gay Men's Chorus whose float was attacked, so we don't have to think of this as a hate crime. 

Sure we do. Of course we do. We don't need to ponder the nature of the hate very long. It doesn't have to be religious or political or related to lifestyle in any way to be hate. It's that flash of cognition in human brains that other species do not share. Driving vehicles into crowds has become vogue, eliminating that need for the background checks and permits that would usually slow down an assailant with a gun. 

Oh, yeah. That. Well, maybe when the super-intelligent apes take over, they'll have common sense gun laws.