Look at our planet. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? The places where life exists, the other species, the forests and beaches and even the deserts and badlands where sky meets ground, where rock is scarlet and spirals upward. Perhaps the only place in the universe where life can exist with this vividness, this glut of senses, this beautiful surface world with color and light and fire and air and water and earth and flowers and vibrant life. And look what we’ve done to it.
We were given the greatest gift, life on Earth, the ability to think and reason and create, and we squandered it with war and destruction and pollution. The only species on Earth that finds joy in violence and killing and hurting, the only species that sees the death of some of its kind not as unfortunate but necessary. The lowest animal. Such intelligence, such beauty of thought, and we have turned it towards hate and fire. And yet we have a still greater gift, a gift that some have the shortsightendess not to exercise. It is the only way we can ever repair the damage and waste of sentient life. This gift?
Love. Because we can hate with so much passion, we can love with so much zeal. It’s a paradox, that the species which has for most of its history had no compunction or conscience with war and looting has this ability to love. This ability to love beyond choice and reason. This talent of loving and joy. We may be selfish because of it. We may be cruel in the name of it. We may do anything to protect one person at the cost of countless more innocents because of its sheer power.
But love, this inexplicable emotion shared by so few other species and understood by none, is our salvation. Feeling it is the only way we may make up for this greediness. Because love is patient, kind, and does not wander. The true nature of love, so few can ever feel it, though all have the capacity for it. My fellow members of this species, residents of this world, let us strive to grasp it, no matter what the cost. For how else may we justify our existence on this beautiful planet? Loving with as much passion as some hate is all we can do against our species’ brutality. Love, laugh, and live. Look around and love it all. Protect. Find. Die for it. Because love is the best and brightest of what is human, and we must cherish and do it for all we can. I vow from this moment forward that I will love and extend the hand of it to every fellow creature that can understand it. Because if we turn out to be no more than a misplaced, unplesant memory in this patchwork universe, I do vow in the name of any Creator that exists and weeps at such squandering that I myself will do all I can to prove that memory wrong.
Now who's with me?