Life, or something close to it.

A few days back, a friend of mine told the most absurd of things. He said we were the best creatures on this planet. I couldn’t help but laugh. We, human beings, the best creature? We maybe the smartest, most progressed, technologically developed, articulation capable and evolutionally advanced. But does that make us the best creatures on Earth? First we have to know how do we judge someone, on how good they are? Are we good because we are able to communicate, plan, have more needs than hunger. That just makes us advanced, gifted. That doesn’t make us good. The age of the robots and artificial intelligence will soon be upon us, and they will be able to do all that we do a hundred times better. So, when that time comes, will they be the best creatures?
If we judge on compassion, then I guess, we are capable of being the best. But right now, we are far from it. We are capable of kindness, empathy, care, sympathy, love and all those wonderful things. But at the same time we are also capable of cruelty, contempt, disdain and hatred, and how! We are caring. We understand the pain of others. History is scattered with people who could be nothing but images of God. But history is also littered with people who knew nothing but evil.
Our earth is just about as big as a speck, in the amazingly vast universe, yet we are able to create borders to divide it amongst ourselves, the people. We differ in caste, social status, religion and we think, scratch that, we know every other caste or religion is on the wrong side. We are right. If we are poor, the rich seem beneficiaries of ill-gotten plunder, if we are rich, the poor are insignificant insects who are only there to dirty and populate the earth that belongs to us. We differentiate ourselves from others, but we do not become individuals. We group up, we form mobs, we share beliefs, we follow religions, and we die for our groups, our mobs. We die for our religion, we kill for it. We move headlong onto war, we sing praises for those who killed for our country, those who died for it. We are villains to the enemy, they are villains to us. We spend more and more money on the fight against terrorism. And I am not against trying to rid this world of terrorist, but they, who we brand horrible, vile and wicked, are people too. We are all human beings, but we are ironically deficient in humanity.
The history of mankind has seen people like Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Gautama Buddha and others, who are the great ambassadors of mankind. But where can we hide Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin Dada, Ruhollah Khomeini and so many more. The better things we are capable of, the purity of the things we can do, our goodness, our righteousness, our virtue would make even God proud but our malice, our immorality, our sin, our vice, the evil we are capable of would even put the Devil to shame. I don’t know which creature is the best in the world. Although I do know, we can become the best creatures to tread this planet. We can, but we are not and we probably will never be. The end of the world can only be so far.