Brief Thoughts and Questions on Humanity

I was just thinking that if I could, I'd like to travel for a living. Not tourist travel where there is always a barrier between observer and observed, but a world traveler where I assimilate into different groups of people. Like a monk or something. I've never felt an Us and Them mentality--not until recently. And I feel that's true for a lot of young people until we're told by older generations that, This is how 'They' do it, This is how 'We' do it. People have different ways of wanting or achieving the same goals. Is a Canadian baby any different than an American baby? French to Brazilian? European to Asian? We're so mind-locked into thinking each other a different species that we don't see each other as related.

But then again, maybe we are too distant to care anymore. People are so damn concerned about themselves--including myself--that we ignore others. Maybe the world is too big to care about anyone else. You know, it's like how people lived in tribes and protected their tribes from other tribes and killed other people they considered enemies. Now, we have countries and continents, and so we kill other people because they're trying to hurt us, or in extreme cases, because we want what they have. So where does it end? What does it mean to be human, to act humanely, or to behave like an animal? Humans are animals; perhaps, when we separate ourselves into Us and Them, we're only doing what our instincts tell us to do--the animal instincts.

However, no other animal has ever built a hospital, or performed open heart surgery, or air-shipped millions of pounds of food to the other side of the world, or opened schools, or kept written records, or harnessed electricity, or done any of the wonderful things only humans are capable of. So then, is there a line between human and animal? Can we become more than our natural instincts and let go of our own self-interest for the sake of a more harmonious world?