People love anything that absolves them of guilt. I was watching a video of a manatee stranded on a beach being rescued by a surfer dude who dragged it back to the sea, where it gleefully swam away. How nice, right? “Faith in humanity restored!” people commented on the video robotically.
Finally, something that suggests to us that mankind isn’t really a selfish, reckless scourge! Really? You’re going to base your faith in humanity on a probably staged YouTube clip and ignore the one trillion-odd fish we kill for food every year? You’re going to give humanity a pass on the billion odd pounds of plastic we dump in the ocean every year for fish to choke on?
Do you realize that of the mammals we have left on this planet, 96% are either human or are currently being raised for human consumption in factory farms? We have effectively eradicated wildlife.
If anything, my faith in humanity goes down when I see kind-to-animal human gestures going viral because I can feel the hundred million odd video viewers telling themselves: You know what? We aren’t so bad, us humans. We drag manatees back to sea. We pull straws out of turtles’ faces. We clean ducks’ feathers after an oil spill. If anything, humans are animals’ best friends!
News flash, humans—you’re the scum of the Earth. Your faith in humanity is, at best, misplaced.
