Sunday 16 March 2014

The Human Condition

It's crazy how well we treat stray animals yet we don't seem to share the same feelings towards homeless people.

At my university we have a pack of stray cats, who I will admit are adorable. Now almost every time I pass the park in which they live I see someone feeding them. Sometimes it's just scraps from their own lunch, but at times I have seen people cross the road to the Woolworths to buy a can of tuna for each cat. While this is an amazing demonstration for the compassion humans have for animals in need, it raises the question of how well we treat our fellow humans who are in much the same condition as the cats.

How many times do we see people out in the streets who have nothing, and we continue on our way doing nothing about it? And for some people (not mentioning any names Tony Abbot) this extends to not offering help to people fleeing war torn countries. I'm not going to let this post get to political, but Mr Abbot seems to be one of these people who refuse to help his fellow man. From not allowing to people who are madly in love to get married purely based on their gender through to refusing to help people who are begging for help because they are forced to flee their home country and travel to Australia with nothing more than the clothes on their back.

As news progresses I find that it almost appears that humans will only help an animal that they deem cute. For example the minute an animal becomes threatening we have to try and kill it, the biggest example of this for Australians is the Western Australia Shark Culls. Basically, for those of you unaware, there were a few shark attacks and the government retaliated by killing any shark over a certain size. Where has all the compassion that we showed the cats gone?

Maybe that's the true human condition. We can only show compassion to those things that we find cute or harmless, something you can feed once and then walk away, there the problem isn't too big or scary. For the minute it seems like things will contribute to something outside of our bubble we lose interest. Now this being said it's not the case for all people, The March in March showed that thousands of people were fed up with the way our government was treating people and that we are ready for change. Let's just hope that our leaders head the call and are willing to make a change to help our fellow humans.

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