In Humane

Prologue

humane

adjective

UK

/hjuːˈmeɪn/

US

/hjuːˈmeɪn/

showing kindness, care and  sympathy towards others,  especially those who are suffering :

The humane way of dealing with a  suffering animal (= the way that causes the least pain ) is to kill it quickly.

Humane. This is a word that has been troubling me for the past, well, quite a few years. Ever since I started contemplating about things other than my acne, my grades and my love life, realizing that acne is completely normal at my age and that grades are as useless as most of the stuff I'm being taught at school and leaving my love life behind (as if there ever was anything to leave behind, on that note), I started looking further, searching for the bigger picture, philosophizing about things larger than my little self, thinking thoughts greater than any I have encountered before. And on this journey, on which I've been on and off, depending on how much my parents pushed me towards improving, no, not my skin, but my grades, I've encountered this one word many times.

Humane. What does it mean? was my first thought. And as the good student I am, I reached for my dictionary, well, my smartphone, and looked the word up via google. The definition above was the first thing that popped out of that trusty old search engine. But this definition was not enough for me. My young, tiny soul desired more than just these few funny words which were put before me. So I looked further. And then even further.

Interesting, I thought, hoping the part of my personality that often demands clarification and additional information would be satisfied. Well, since you're reading this, you've probably already found out that it wasn't. I wanted to dig even deeper, to understand the word to its full potential. The problem is, I'm not an expert, especially not when it comes to English, since it isn't even my first language, and I sure as hell don't like studying lingua in a way many academics do. What I wanted to do, was to understand how could a word that essentially meant "being a human or behaving as one" be presented as simply as "Killing a suffering animal". Well, I might not be a language expert, but I love history. And philosophy. Now, combine these two, as well as this one, simple word. What do you get?

One fuck-ton of dilemmas.