So the substitute history professor asks us, what do you think about people? Do you think they're essentially good and a few fall through the cracks, or essentially bad with a few good exceptions?

It had been one of those conversations where nobody raises their hands, a round-table don't-overthink-it clattering mess of voices and opinions, so I didn't think about my answer; it was immediate, instinctive.

"Rotten," I said, and realized as the girl next to me turned to stare that I meant it. And so I considered. "I think we're terrible," I continued, and now I was slower in my verbalization, "and we overcome our base nature anytime we do anything good."

"God, you're a cynic," someone said, and I thought about that. "I don't think so," I replied after a minute.

And I don't. See, I see people do good things, beautiful things, all the time. I didn't realize one of the reasons it makes me so damn happy is because it's proof that people can overcome that basic, steaming, smelling-of-shit lizard-brained thing that crouches at the heart of the human soul. We are born selfish, we live selfishly, it is at the spine of species survival that we be selfish. We are violent and we are cruel and we are most of us out to screw the other guy just as hard as we can, and we are these things because our lizard-brain tells us that we must succeed, we must overcome, we must take from the other guy what we want for ourselves or we will die.

And this would be a cynical view, were it not for the fact that I believe that we are not only capable of overcoming that basic instinct, but willing to beat it back into the dust every single day. We want to be better than that, we strive to be better than that. Is it cynical to say that Mother Theresa was that much better a person for overcoming the species-specific, genetically-programmed need to cause harm, to not give a good goddamn about other people?

The capability to do good is the single most beautiful thing about the human race, because in order to do good, we first have to realize, against our own nature, that we want to. And we succeed at it. Every damn day.

Cynical? I don't think so.

Just a terrible person trying to do the best she can to be better than herself.

Just like you.