We worry a lot about bad behavior. Kids ignoring social distancing during a pandemic. White cops killing unarmed black people; people frying their brains on drugs or alcohol; families torn apart by domestic violence; destruction of the environment by greed-driven corporations: we have no end of bad behavior to concern us. But is there a common thread?

Until the pandemic began, people gathered in the streets to protest historic levels of economic inequality, or catastrophic climate change. People demonstrated against killings motivated by racism or fanaticism, the surveillance state, cuts to poor people’s programs, or bombing campaigns in countries we can barely find on a map. Were these protests connected?

Something is brewing beneath the surface of our society. We have spent too many years on a path toward self-destruction, sometimes making progress but more often sliding backwards. Racism still hurts and kills people of color every day. Poverty makes hellish the lives of billions. Male aggression wounds and kills women. Our news media tell us lies or partial truths, and all our media conspire to distract us with trivia. And we continue to pollute our air and water, level forests, and strangle fellow-species with our trash, in spite of all our green intentions. Is it any wonder so many people are angry?

Is this the way we are doomed to behave? Do we have any other options? Or are we just greedy, curious, violent primates who will soon poison ourselves with our own waste? Many voices tell us that war is inevitable. They tell us that big corporations and rich people get their own way, that’s just how it is. But is that how it has to be?

We need to look around for examples of people doing things right. If we look, we will find them. In fact most people, most of the time, are doing things as right as our culture will let them. They work. In a lock-down, they stay home. They pay their bills. They wait patiently in line. They try to meet their responsibilities. They are kind. You can think they are suckers. Or maybe they are the meek who are supposed to inherit the earth.

If it were not for other people’s good behavior, meaning decent, helpful behavior, none of us would survive infancy. Good behavior is the ground against which bad behavior stands out. We take it for granted, just as we used to take our health for granted unless we got sick. For most of us, if we know the right thing to do, we will try to do it.

The problem with most people, the problem with the meek, is that we think we have no power. If we don’t have money or celebrity, we think we’re nobody. Yet most of the people in the world want only to be able to live life in peace. What if all of us nobodies decided to act together to make that possible?

But before we can even think about what we have to do to survive, we have to believe that humanity deserves to survive. We have reason to think otherwise — far too many reasons to think we are only a plague on the planet. Give the earth a few million years without us and she will generate millions of new life forms, every bit as marvelous and exuberant and weird as the life forms we are annihilating today. We will be gone, and no one will miss us. Why fight it?

Because the majority of us, the meek, deserve better than to go extinct. Our monstrous world system is run by a cynical few who refuse to allow any changes that would threaten their power, even if we need to make those changes in order for the species to survive. The idea that humanity is not worth saving is the most dangerous weapon in their arsenal. This is a sword that strikes down many good people, strikes them so they choose to sit and watch the carnage, strikes them so they choose not to intervene. They are among the walking wounded of this civilization. Their hearts have been crippled.

There are many reasons to feel the earth would be better off without us. They are all reasons to make peace with Apocalypse, the end of all human hopes. But spend some time around very young humans, and all those reasons come to nothing. We are born beautiful. We are as innocent and as lovely as any species on the planet. It is the culture based on greed and violence that is ugly and deserves to die.