Here we are, deep into the early days of a political campaign year. We will have to endure the preening, boasting, promising—and sometimes bullying—of those who want to attract our money and our votes. It’s a time for Egos on Parade, candidates from all parties promising that they can do magnificent things—as if there were no other parts of government or levels of government with a voice in doing things.   The phrase “reality check” didn’t come into use until thirty years after Dr. Crane died. But that’s what he offers. This entry might not matter to our big-time candidates but maybe it might help us little people (who are bigger if we vote) to look for someone with a tinge of—–

HUMANITY

What is my boasted independence? I am dependent upon everybody and everything. I go with the crowd. I am caught in the press of men. I must move with them.

All my ancestors have left me something. Not money or goods, but deeper potencies. What I call my character or nature is made up of infinite particles of inherited tendencies from those whose blood runs in my veins. A little seed of laziness from this grandfather and of prodigality from that. Some remote grandmother, perhaps, as stamped me with a fear of horses or a love of dogs. There may be in me a bit of outlawry from some forefather who was a pirate, and a dash of piety from one who was a saint.

So everything in me passes on through my children and flecks of my children’s children with a spot of strength or weakness. I am sewn in between ancestry and posterity. I am a drop of water in a flowing river. I am a molecule in a mountain. I am a cell in a great tree.

The words I think are not mine. They are humanity’s. Millions made them, as a coral reef into which my thoughts creep.

My gestures, ways, mannerisms, so-called peculiarities, I borrowed them all.

Religion is not a personal affair so much as it is a communal. You are a Jew because you were born a Jew; for the same reason you are a Catholic, you are a Presbyterian, you a Mahometan, you a Buddhist, you a Mormon. As we enter life we find these cells already made in the human beehive and crawl into them.

The Young lover imagines no one else ever felt his pangs and ecstasies; yet Nature is but repeating in him the motions she has made in a myriad others.

“Nothing human is alien to me,” said the philosopher.

Said Burke, “Society is a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living and those who are dead—and those who are to be born.”

What I call my opinion—how much of it is but echo? Opinions are catching, like measles or smallpox. Our notions of art, letters, politics, morals, we have but secreted them from the mass.

Original ideas? Where will you find them? All the ideas there are exist now, floating in the human sea. I, an oyster, absorb a few and call them mine. Even the phrases of the Lord’s Prayer have been traced to Talmudic sources.

“The dewdrop slips into the shining sea.” The river of humanity emerges from the infinite and pours ever into the infinite again.

In passing how we perk ourselves up into strange egotisms! We strut, gesticulate, contend, and talk of me and mine, only to go down at last in the cataract that, unceasing as Niagara, empties into the unknown.

Let us, therefore, put away the coarse egotisms and the partisan passions that infest us, and learn to love humanity, to think and feel in terms of humanity.