Basically Good

It is a sad truth of humanity, and perhaps our greatest shame, but we are not born good; we aren’t.
Children may be sweet and soft and small and precious beyond measure but they are not born good. Children are not born kind and do not inicaially care about others. They do not want to share they’re toys and cannot empathise with other children. When you try to hug them only to have them run away and you make a sad face to sho then they have hurt your feelings they simply look confused.
Humanity is not born with kindness or love. Every religion has its own take on this phenomenon. Christianity calls it original sin but by whatever name it is the same sad truth. We may not be born guilty of evil but we are not born good.
That it learned.
We teach our children to share they’re toys with one another and not to hit or bite. We teach pre-schoolers that bullying is bad and that if you see a person hurt another person you should tell somebody. We teach our teenagers that racism is wrong and homophobia is naïve and that we must accept refugees into the country dispite any potential disadvantages it may cause to current Australians because that it the right thing to do. To help one another. To share these ‘boundless plains’ of our. To protect one another and not to make others feel different, unloved or unwanted.
We fail time and time again.
We put people of different beliefs in concentration camps and steal the children of other cultures. We rape and abuse and murder and then we stop. We make peace. We apologise and we continue this endless struggle to find the right way to live. The children teach the old that words like ‘nigger’ and ‘poppy’ and worse then any cuss word and then our culture simply forgets them. Daughter’s tell their mother’s they can dress how they like because their body is their own and they have a right to be proud of it. This beautiful that is not for anyone else. Woman say that men should have more rights to their children because ‘courts almost always side with the mother’ and men tell one another to ‘have some respect.’
We teach ourselves to be good and kind and generous. We invent words like morality and ethics; we invent the ideas they describe. So no, maybe we weren’t made this way but we chose it. We chose to be good.
I rather think that’s worth more, don’t you?