When I mistook my wife’s beloved poppy plant for a weed and mowed it down, I did not, upon her discovery of the newly deceased, identify my species and expect that to make things alright. I did not say, like Fort Meade City Manager Jan Bagnall said to the City Council in May, “I’m a human being; I will make mistakes.”
Bagnall found it necessary to publicly reveal he is a member of the species Homo sapiens because he had made a costly error. According to The (Lakeland, Florida) Ledger, Bagnall had signed a purchase order to buy a $625,000 fire engine that neither he nor the Fort Meade City Council wanted. Bagnall “admitted during Tuesday’s meeting that he had failed to read the three-page contract carefully and had thought he was merely signing an amendment to an existing order with Toyne Fire Apparatus, an Iowa-based manufacturer.”
“Do you crucify somebody for one or two mistakes?” Bagnall asked, prior to the City Council’s vote to retain his services or remove him from office.
“I still think you ought to resign,” a city councilman said to the Homo sapiens.
In a 3-2 vote, the City Council decided to keep Bagnall but urged him to devise a better system for emergency vehicle acquisition.
A search on the internet reveals that seeking understanding and empathy because one is a human is a common refrain for murderers, adulterers (especially adulterers), blackmailers, drug dealers, drug users, and former Red Sox player Pablo Sandoval, who was suspended for liking a picture on Instagram during a baseball game. “I made a mistake. … I’m a human being,” Sandoval later tweeted to Red Sox Nation.
Playing the human card after a human makes a mistake has to stop because it is doing serious damage to our species’ reputation. For this reason, I am calling on my fellow human beings to join me in a rebranding campaign that celebrates, rather than maligns, our species.
If you think I’m blowing things out of proportion, consider the following point. When we someday join the community of intergalactic species, do we really want the other life forms to equate our species with the word “blunder” or “snafu”? Remember that famous alien barroom scene in the movie “Star Wars”? Imagine a Gwarkle spills his drink all over a Dubwaddlebink. I want the Gwarkle to say, “I’m a Gwarkle; I will make mistakes,” not “Sometimes I act just like a human being.”
You might think the guy driving his car through a red light is possibly a Homo neanderthalensis or a Homo erectus, but you’d be wrong. All the other Homo species in our genus made a bunch of serious boo-boos, so now all that is left of them is a fossil record. Because there isn’t any other species you or I could be, folks need to stop thinking it’s the equivalent of a gender reveal party to announce to those within earshot, “I’m a human.”
So instead of notifying people you are a human the next time you drop a piano down a flight of stairs, from now on only invoke your species when you do something miraculous, like bake a batch of chocolate chip cookies without burning any of them, or single-handedly push a car out of a snowbank, or replace a mowed-over poppy plant with a $50 gift card to a garden center near you. Then step forward, head held high, and utter the following words: “I am a human; I am wonderful.”
Gregory Greenleaf lives in Harpswell and teaches high school English. He ascribes, prescribes and subscribes to many old-fashioned ideas, but especially Charles Dickens’ observation that “There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.”
