The fatal flaw with us (human beings), the flaw which will ultimately lead to our collective downfall as a species, is that we never learn from our mistakes. We have committed THE SAME atrocities throughout history. Look at the horrible treatment of human beings throughout history. The Chinese Dynasties, the Roman Empire, Colonization, Slavery, World War II, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, the middle east, the Philippines. I'm sure we could all think of many others to add to this list. There is one common thread that repeats itself. We feel compelled to fight these "Hatfield vs McCoy," battles in a perverse effort to preserve our particular society, a subset of our own species. Throughout history, we see someone different and instinctively fear their culture, their different appearance, their different beliefs. We feel the need to dominate them or eliminate them before accepting and incorporating them into our societies. We put rightous tags, like "our religion" or "our need to colonize" to rationalize these fears and actually get ourselves to believe that we are doing "what is right" or what is good. Before long two societies of human beings have cannibalized each other. Who was initially "right" or "wrong" or justified or whatever is completely lost in the atrocities committed by both sides. Ironically, our various religions, cultures, and ways of living have many startling underlying similarities, but more often than not we are too blinded by our fear and need to preserve ourselves to see them.

Our instinct to battle and preserve had a purpose many billions of years ago, but our world has evolved quite a bit since that time. Unfortunately, I believe we as human beings can envision and have seen evidence of a level of evolution where we freely accept others, but deep down we know that, collectively, human nature will never allow us to reach that level. It may or may not happen within our lifetime, but we will probably destroy our own species. We have the capacity to do so, and we have come within minutes of doing so twice already during the cold war. You'd think we would learn from these mistakes one of these days.