Are We Evolving?

I think many of us have already heard about the CEO who has been arrested and charged with animal cruelty.  He was abusing in an elevator his Doberman puppy and the news is all over the local media.  Until just the last five years or so I don't recall animal cruelty being so reported about and so condemned in the media.  Could it be that we are making yet another step forward in becoming a kinder and more peaceful humanity?  Wouldn`t it be lovely?

Ah, the poor old school Canadian male.  And can just hear him grumbling between drags from his near-illicit cigarette in a shop doorway while ignoring the dirty looks of fit and healthy young pedestrians waving away the second hand smoke: "Can't hit the ol' lady no more; can't smack the kid; now I can't even kick my dog.  Goddam politically correct police state."

At least I could imagine my dad saying something like that, though, as far as I know, he never hit my mother, at least not in front of me except one time when I saw him slap my mother's face.  They were having an argument, more a screaming quarrel.  I must have been...ten?  He didn't hit me too often, though he did use emotional and sexual abuse as a weapon of dominance over me.  He really beat my brother a couple of times within an inch of his life.  And kicking or slapping down a badly behaved dog?  He'd sooner shoot it.

Now, in our enlightened time, such behaviour is not only unconscionable.  It is illegal.  I could have called the cops on both my parents.  I would have been taken away from them into protective custody.  I would have testified against them in court.  I am not exaggerating.

Could this be the New Jerusalem?  Even if we are hearing on the news about two young idiot, brothers, from Calgary, brought up in the middle class comfort of a privileged Christian home, have converted to Islam and are now radicalized thugs with Isis in the Middle East cutting throats and chopping off heads of infidels and the wrong flavour of Islam?  Their understandably traumatized and heart-broken mommy and daddy have publicly expressed dismay and fear of the harm their cherished darlings might encounter.  They don't appear terribly concerned about the harm their little boys are inflicting on innocent others.  And maybe this is exactly why have they turned out this way.

Don't get me wrong.  I am absolutely overjoyed that here in the West we are becoming increasingly humane, gentle and empathic, despite, in Canada, anyway, a near decade of this country being ruined by a backward Conservative government.  Set foot though anywhere in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia, and from all the news reports it would appear that we have not progressed one single micro-millimetre.  This is a judgment I cannot really make given that I have only media reports to go by and we know what reliable information this can be.

All I hope for is that we continue to evolve in this direction of kindness, in the hope that our compassion and love proves to be stronger than the hate and brutality that does not seem to be prepared to release a large chunk of the world from it`s bloody and stinking claws.