These past few years have felt like an unrelenting confrontation with the darkest facets of human nature. Multiple quarantines and the inescapable news cycle have left us with precious little respite from the complexity of our emotions. We have been faced with disease, systemic oppression, climate disaster, and a government that has often seemed to be veering closer and closer to fascism. Add to that the mundane rollercoaster of daily life, and what you have is the perfect conditions for forced reflections on the state of humanity.
The thing is that most of us can’t think about humanity as a concept without including ourselves — nor should we. When George Floyd was murdered, we all asked ourselves how we have been personally complicit in the white supremacist worldview that allows such atrocity. COVID has made us very aware of how much we are — or aren’t — willing to be inconvenienced for the sake of others. Basically, a lot of us have ended up asking ourselves not just whether humans are good, but whether we ourselves are good.
