AN OPEN LETTER TO THE HUMAN RACE

Dear humanity,

           How did we get to this point? How did we, great humanity, suddenly become slaves to insects and germs? Are we no longer gods and demigods, and lords and overlords?  Haven’t we numbered all the stars of heaven, and have reached, with our telescopes, the innermost edges of the universe?  We’ve solved the dilemma of communication, have captured entire realities in affordable screens; we have sent our men to the moon, have had our places among the stars, have peered into the dark chambers of the human heart. Still, we remain wretched.

          We say we are masters of everything but each passing day, everything humiliates and enslaves and rules over us. But we never stop boasting.  We call ourselves what we are not and had never been and will never be: we say we are the sweetest apples of Eden, the most enlightened offspring of nature, the loftiest byproducts of evolution, the caretakers of planet earth, and of the solar system, and of the entire universe, and of universes not yet known. But what are we, really? We are nothing!

       In the face of this infinite universe, in the grand scheme of things, we stand naked and empty, every one of us. Our ideas have taken us nowhere; our dreams of paradise have drawn us only into the hotter regions of hell; we are full of high hopes, we dream and dream, and sink into endless despair. Five thousand years of science, six thousand years of philosophizing and speculating; seven thousand years of transacting with spirits, and we are still here, in this vast highway to nowhere.  We are still helpless, still captives to earthquakes and hurricanes, still cringing at the sound of comets and asteroids, still miserable in the hands of a more miserable virus. We converse with dictionaries and thesauruses, we think like angels, but we go about life with the spirit of apes and antelopes. Man, after all these years, is still manlike, still brutish, still self-seeking, still rich with wars and robberies. He does and speaks of noble things in his mind but he succumbs every now and then to the laws of the wild.

             Where is the advancement, where is the greatness, where is the progress we say we’re making? Every step into the future leads us back into our early beginnings. Every stride into heaven pulls us into Hades.  Our inventions have borne witness against us; our solutions have become our greatest problems. We pray, we think, we make findings, we do all that is “humanly possible,” to get into our clearly impossible future.  Our best efforts only fling us into greater despair. For today or tomorrow, the unforeseen, the unthinkable hits and we’re all smoked out of earth, in bits and pieces.  Today or tomorrow, disaster the size of Jupiter may strike and end all our days. Our dear moon may shrink away. Our beloved sun may roast us into ashes. An asteroid may miss its way and munch us out of being. A wicked virus may fly off its cage? And what will happen to us? What will happen to our biology and physics? What shall be the fate of Netflix and NASA, and Champions League and Nobel Prize, and the everlasting stock-market? We know the answer. They’ll be gone! And we’ll be gone with them! Forever.

         When shall these things be? In the future? No, not likely.  A messenger of Satan is here already in our midst? An apocalypse is staring us in the face? Should we keep hoping, and dreaming, and laboring in empty delusion? Perhaps we should resign to our wretched fates. Or fight until we lose, and keep seeking solutions until our problems swallow us up. We should fight. For, in giving up we make fools and cowards of ourselves; in giving up we forsake our ancient spirit of humanity, that doggedness that raised the Pyramids, and conquered the Holocaust, that ruggedness that toppled apartheid, and made slaves of giant machines. We fight not with certainty. No, we fight not with high hopes. We fight with nothing. We simply fight. And watch things happen. And pray for a turn-around. And look, no matter how hard or humiliating, beyond this mortal minds of ours for help.  For the answer, dear human race, if there be any answer at this point, if this is not the end of our race, lies beyond us, beyond our laboratories, beyond our philosophies, beyond the temples of our warring religions, beyond all that concerns us. And there we must look—beyond, far away from us. We must keep dreaming our dreams, but we must wake up with renewed vigor and more sensible sense, with an unbroken resolve to forge new and transcendent paths into our imagined destinies. 

           Keep your hope alive, till  we meet at the other end of the tunnel.

                                                                                                        Your brother

                                                                                                         Udeme Ralph