You humans make everything so complicated, She laughed gently over my shoulder.  You know what is right and what is wrong, yet you tangle everything up. You don’t listen.

And Bast was right, of course. We agonize over morality, weighing current realities against future hypotheticals, questioning manifest destiny yet clinging to divine right. Instead of listening to the voice inside us for the answer, we pour all our energy and resources into digging the truth out of the sky and the earth, out of each other, out of DNA and atoms and numbers. We demand proof beyond what we deserve and evidence beyond what we are freely offered. We commit crimes and only in retrospect do we bother wondering if we acted wrongly, because instead of admitting what we know deep in our blood – that all life is sacred, all life is precious, all life is equal and deserving of its existence – we pretend concrete confirmation is necessary to make our choices. While we review the past with the perfect righteousness of the present, so do we look to the future with the present’s self-serving morality. It’s who we are as a species, anxious creatures that must pick apart and analyze until we’re frozen by indecision. Are we inherently better than our fellow animals, and therefore justified in their killing? Do we have the right to close our hearts the homeless and the hopeless? Can we value our own prejudices over the basic needs of others, and make laws to keep them down? We know the answers without intense analysis; we just don’t want to hear them.