Being human first

 In reading the political news, I found myself wondering whether some people think they will be exempt from the diminishments of aging. The decline of one human being is not tragic because it’s inevitable. It happens to us all.

But it seems to me that human beings should have compassion for the common condition of humanity, some spirit that runs deeper than the spirit of politics. Henry David Thoreau put it this way:

 

I would remind my countrymen, that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour.

 

• Source: The Quotable Thoreau, edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011, p. 389. It’s a line from the essay “Slavery in Massachusetts.”