Crimes Against Humanity:  Sadly, since humans are, at best, a disappointment to the humanity for which we are technically the root, the lists of horrors that we have heaped upon each other, (as well as nearly every other living thing on Earth), is so spine-tinglingly brutal, staring too intently could lead to biblical, stone-turning consequence.  So, until there is literally no place else to look, we seem programmed to simply look away.

I think we’re fundamentally mis-wired.  Civilization, as far as it can be anthropologically traced, accepted the cleansing of “others” as a primary directive.  One can imagine the conflict of early man’s need to organize communal shelter and create a process for food and water collection and distribution when our inbred survival-of-the-fittest genes kept screaming, “Mine, mine, mine!”  But, we’ve been working at this societal thing for 5,000 years or so and, although we have nearly every tool necessary to make life on this planet Utopian-esque, we have, instead, chosen to become better, more efficient and shamefully more unkind toward one another.  Okay…okay…not all of us.  There was Mother Teresa and…um…uh…I’m sure some others, but everywhere there are people, there is a preponderance of historical and the contemporaneous evidence that we pretty much suck at playing well together.

This is where I would make a list of as many genocides, religious crusades, ethnic cleanses and other random acts of evil that I could muck up, but it proved too much to endure, even for my cold, cold heart.

Putin’s insane attack on Ukraine and the growing outrage it has instilled, is the most currently overt.  CNN, MSNBC and most of the major news outlets have designed their own “World at War” graphics with accompanying Ukraine-ish music.  Round the clock videos and photos of “this-may-be-too-graphic-for-some-viewers” reportage have relentlessly sucked up all the air while countless on-going atrocities elsewhere, go unmentioned.  Of course, most would profess their support of the oppressed while conveniently suppressing their own prejudices, but the lessons, the never again proclamations, continue, generation after generation, to be disconnected mottos.