Can humanity be redeemed?

I have changed.

In the very heart of my being, I am a different person.

The way I define myself; the way I define humanity: it is all changed utterly; but there is no beauty sufficient to redeem humanity for me. I can see no hope for humanity.

Yesterday on the radio I heard the account of Zawadi Mongane, a young woman from the Congo, who was forced to hang her own baby by rebel soldiers after watching them butcher other villagers, including her brother and her two oldest children.

No person living or dead can do enough to assuage that crime. I feel guilt and utter shame that fellow human beings could perpetrate such a crime.

Reckless, thoughtless selfishness seems to be the norm for people. I have known this for a long time. Never before now have I understood the depths of depravity that human beings can sink to. Despite the vast works of art, literature and history that exist dedicated to the holocaust, it somehow never quite struck home. Maybe because it was an historical act - an act outside my lifetime - and also maybe because of the political manipulation that so often goes hand-in-hand with holocaust accounts; and maybe also because the descendants of the victims of that holocaust are intent on becoming aggressors and criminals in their own right in the way they treat the Palestinian people inside and outside Israel. For them, it was not a crime against humanity, but a crime against Judaism.

Can anything redeem humanity from this crime against Zawadi Mongane? It seems to me that if every human being alive and yet to come were to do nothing but good, selfless acts for all eternity, it would be insufficient.

We are men of filth.