So much screwin' up in such a short time!

The earth has been around for 4.5 billion years. Humans, Homo sapiens, for only 2 million years. Organized somewhat "modern" humans for only 10,000-20,000 years, depending on what criteria are used for defining what "modern" means.

In those 10,000-20,000 years we've created cultures and cities and multitudes of gods and religions. We've also fought each other and undermined each other in at attempt to push one agenda over another. We've fought wars over the gods and religions and political agendas that we've created.

We've created countries and within those countries we've created cliques. Some examples of these cliques are religions and political parties. We humans that share so many similarities love to fracture ourselves into cliques or groups. These groups are then destined to war against each other. It's one of our tragic flaws as a species. We first united as a species tribally and we continue to operate tribally, the tribes continue to battle each other but our weapons have "advanced" from spears and rocks to rhetoric and words.

As we've evolved our brains have grown larger. I am hard pressed to find any significant proof that our larger brains have served us in any beneficial manner. All too often we've used these big brains to to fracture our human society rather than create a cohesive environment that would make us all stronger as a species.

A species. Humankind. A miracle of nature that will perhaps never enjoy the 160 million year reign on Earth that even the small minded dinosaurs enjoyed if we don't work together for a common cause.

The dinosaurs didn't have religion or politics yet they ruled this Earth for 160 million years basically operating on instinct and a brain stem. The big ones ate the little ones. We can do better than this.

Yet us humans, this happy accident of evolution, we will most likely not have such a long and prosperous future because we've created a scenario in which our life is just too complicated.

It's in our nature though, human nature, to make things too complicated. We are too superstitious and too war mongering. We are too distrustful of each other.

Until we can "fix" some of the basic flaws in the human makeup we are destined to fail. We'll fail at politics, we'll fail at maintaining a healthy planet whose conditions allow us to flourish, we'll fail at preserving our species in a healthy manner because we as humans are programmed to disagree based on concepts that we ourselves have created. Concepts of inequality and the idea that one religion, skin color, nationality or political affiliation is better than another.

Any human on the face of this Earth shares more than 99% of our DNA makeup with any other human. We are a happy accident of nature that, because of no catastrophic climate or asteroid/comet events in recent history, have been given a window of opportunity to survive here on good old planet Earth.

There are few guarantees in the future, except for the fact that our sun will turn into a red giant and engulf the Earth in another 5 billion years. The other guarantees are that something big from space will hit us again at some point and mother Earth herself will cycle through ice ages and climate changing volcanic episodes. The continents will once again join together and pull apart.

If we don't start becoming a cohesive unit regardless of religion or politics or race, then we won't be around to witness the next global challenge that mother Earth or even our solar system will send our way.

This is not just true for the USA but for the world as a whole.

I want to put the healthcare debate and this great fractioning of America into perspective and this is the best way that I know to illustrate how absolutely ridiculous our behavior is.

We are one species, Homo sapiens, united by DNA, yet fractured by our ideas, courtesy of our big brains. If we can't agree to take care of each other in this time of relative calm here on Earth, how will we ever make it though a global catastrophe?