When the foot is swollen, the kidney ailing,
The neck stiff, the spirit troubled,
The heartbeat irregular, the head stuffy,
The thoughts narrow and negative,
But the whole taken together
Generally functional,
Can we say that the body is healthy?
So it is with humanity.
These are some of the illnesses of the race:
Tyranny, starvation, religious and tribal wars,
Repression, poverty, alienation, genocide,
Indifference, xenophobia, illiteracy,
Bad governments, epidemics, selfishness.
We must face the fact that
Given the whole picture
The human race is not that well.
We have also, it cannot be denied,
Accomplished great feats.
We have journeyed to space and spied
On the solitude of uninhabited planets.
We have created mighty secular
And religious structures,
Made fabulous technological inventions,
Found cures for horrible diseases,
Solved some riddles of human genetics,
Probed the mysteries of the weather,
Shed light on the aberrations of the mind,
Explored the possibilities of communications,
And tapped the awesome ambiguous
Power of nuclear energy.
And yet, because of our pollutions,
Earth's fragile balance is askew.
Humanity dies in refugee camps,
Goes mad in ghettoes,
Is brutalised by bad governments,
And perishes in festering wars.
And yet hatreds boil away
For reasons of history
And for different interpretations
Of the same sacred texts
That preach universal love.
We are amazing:
So much gold has been revealed
In the human spirit.
So many wonderful philosophies
Of startling simplicity
Have been dreamt up and shared
Amongst us,
And yet we still live
As if in Plato's cave,
Watching the shadows
Of sufferings go past
As if they had nothing to do with us.
And yet we live as if these thoughts,
These dreams, these philosophies,
Had not been uttered,
And never been beneficial.
I contend that the human race
Has not yet reached
The true condition
Of civilisation.
Sure, the quality of life has been enriched
For many over the past centuries;
But true civilisation is much more
Than the technological progress
Or well-being of part of the human race.
What we call civilisations
Are merely stages on the way
To true world civilisation.
(Ben Okri)
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