My brother came over for dinner the other night, and I asked him the question I posed to just about everyone I’ve met lately: Where’s your go-to for news?

First, I admitted mine: C-SPAN 1 and 2, and PBS News Hour. Why? No commercials and a neutral, in-depth presentation of the news.

My brother answered 780 AM radio in the morning to hear the facts. I said I was surprised he didn’t indulge more. That’s when he brought up Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species.

“Read chapters three and four,” he said. Summarizing, he reported Darwin ignores humans, rather focusing on relatively small, to us, insignificant species that try to destroy each other due to limited resources. Survival among them is earned by the strongest, fastest, best evolved, and those good at calculus.

Just kidding about the math thing.

He then suggested that the news culled from radio, TV, or streaming didn’t matter because he knew what he’d hear or see: Our species, Homo sapien, battling each other, often to the death, just like the “animal” world.

I saw his point, recalling copious human fistfights, melees, skirmishes, clashes, feuds, campaigns, battles, and wars fought everywhere on earth for millennia. Even cavemen and cavewomen most likely used clubs for something more than knocking out sabretooth tigers.

My brother implied he needn’t listen to the news because he already anticipated the news, because it was all old news, news we have been, still are, and always will be generating, much of it involving destroying one another with the same old rationale, transformed only by newer, faster, more lethal ways to accomplish it.

I wondered, “Are we going to survive as a species, the way things are going? They moved up the Doomsday Clock.”

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reset it to 85 seconds (from 89) to midnight in January because, “…[I]ncreasing international conflict, particularly the Russia-Ukraine war and Middle East instability” (AI Overview).

Trying to think positively, how can humankind combat combat? How can we wage war against waging war?

Maybe it takes listening to recently deceased Jesse Jackson’s wisdom: “Never look down on anybody unless you’re helping him up;” “America is more like a quilt: Many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread;” “It is time for us to turn to each other, not on each other.”

Or selflessly doing what the garbage man did for my wife when she hurriedly tried to slip on her boots, got them halfway on, then ran out to tip him when she fell on the driveway. About to leave, seeing Tia trip and slowly standing back up, the driver leaped out of the cab and ran toward her, asking, “Are you all right?”

“I wish I’d had more to give him,” Tia said when back inside. “He was so nice.”

By the way, out the kitchen window I saw her on her knees, but was late to the party, even though I ran, well, walked out to help her, in my socks, a real sacrifice when you think about it.

But there you have it. Someone who didn’t know us from Mick Jagger and Joan Baez offered his sympathy and his arm.

Maybe we won’t destroy ourselves after all. Maybe we’ll put out an arm and provide our neighbors not combat, but succor and compassion.

Now that’s newsworthy.

• Rick Holinger won the Choeofpleirn Press nonfiction prize for Manure Dreams and Other Essays, available at Amazon, Barnes and Nobel, and elsewhere. Contact him at editorial@kcchronicle.com. More information at www.richardholinger.com.