Why We Are Who We Are: The Real Story

Authors note: This is meant to be narrated/read out loud for full enjoyment.

As we all know we were created by the gods, mostly Prometheus. Who was caring, and loving, also slow witted, idiotic, brainless, dumbstruck, and so on and on and on at least in the "ungodly" traits section. You can see he wasn't the smartest of the gods; that's why he was stuck with us. Prometheus gave us fire and intelligence so that we could be the superior race on the earth; the only problem was that he had to make us like the gods to make us powerful enough to make ourselves rulers. More precisely he had to make us able to withstand the harsh realities of the world. He knew that in doing so he would be giving us a bunch of bad traits, and hardly any good ones. "...But," he thought, "It cannot be helped; they must have these good traits to survive." He was already showing a certain flaw in his logic, since the bad ones would just give us more trouble.

He then approached the gods that had the traits humans needed to survive (and incidentally most of the bad traits we now have) and told them of his plight. The first he approached was Zeus, Lord of Thunder, Father of the gods, and leader of them also. This god Prometheus had thought, would give the humans his great strength, superb leadership, and his loving nature towards his wife (two out of three isn't bad I guess). Instead of any of these things they instead were given his lusty nature, me first attitude, and his ability to lie with a straight face. "Now there's something we look for in our friends, hmmmm." Prometheus had struck out.

So he went on to the next god, Ares and commanded, COMMANDED! that the God of War give the humans some of his traits. (That doesn't sound smart to me, commanding the god of war.) Now, Ares was ready to kill Prometheus... as best he could, when a thought came to him (Ares doesn't have many of them I'll bet!), that he could do exactly as Prometheus said and give the humans SOME of his traits - and have fun watching them kill each other. So, he gave them the ability to fight... instead of talking things out, the ability to never make peace, and the ability to strut arrogantly around a battlefield while others were killed. (All prize winning traits I'm sure.) This of course, made humans even more deranged and evil than ever before. The insidious part of it though was that Prometheus couldn't tell and thought that he'd given them his good traits. (Whatever Prometheus thought these were, I'll never know.)

So innocent, some say intelligence - challenged, Prometheus went on his merry way to the last god. This time he'd made a good decision believe it or not, and gone to Athena, the Goddess of wisdom and war. Athena, seeing that Prometheus's Project was a wash, thought long on the subject, for her, which is only about three seconds for us, and came up with a clause that made humans want to better themselves and to work hard at cultivating traits they didn't have, like good naturedness and love. So because of her wisdom we are what we are... very mixed up people!

Joshua Ronald Fornelli copyright 2000