why i am not human

[cobaltdrgn]

For me-- and for many other people in white Western societies-- the word "human" really means "apart".

To be human is to be not-animal, or at least more-than-animal. To be set aside from the "mere beasts", having some exalted place in the hierarchy of life. To be human, said Terry Pratchett, speaking as his character Death, is "to be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape"-- a unique unity between heaven and sullied Earth. Sir Terry was an atheist, as are many who've said similar things. With or without gods, humanity cannot let go of the notion that it, and it alone, is special.

I reject this view from my very core. In fact, it outrages me. You're surrounded by blue whales and tiny gemlike beetles, leaf-shaped lizards and turtles that carry tiny ecosystems on their backs. You share this world with condors and tigers and marmosets and earthworms, elephants and magpies who perform funeral rituals, giant redwoods thousands of years old and creatures that have lived unchanged for far longer than your species has been alive. All around you, unseen processes are unfolding at microscopic levels, in every form of life and in things you consider "unalive", constantly changing and reshaping the world. You are, unavoidably, a part of this great Work. Yet you look around you and see only other humans, alongside a bunch of cute decorations that you can pick up or take down as you please.

I am not... that. I may be human in skin, but I will not ally myself with humanity. I ally myself with the natural world, with Earth as an ecosystem-- of which humans are a part. But until they start seeing themselves as a part, until they acknowledge that Homo sapiens is just another animal, until charity and compassionate behaviour are called by those names and not by "humanity", I will stand with the natural world. I embrace my animality.

I am proud of, and humbled by, the singing in my blood of ancient genes of reptiles past. I am proud of, and humbled by, my descent from a chain of molecular and metaphysical events that started before humanity and will end after humans are long gone. I am proud to be beast, lizard, dragon, reptile, a part of the whole. And I fight, foremost, in that whole's defence.

Comments

[citrakayah]

I've got little to say but "Well said." The human tendency to think of its own welfare first is just as toxic and crude as any narrow nationalism--and, I'm convinced, just as arbitrary, for all that people try to act like it's natural and inevitable.