Not so plucky yesterday

Yesterday's "Word of the Day" from dictionary.com was:

plucky \PLUHK-ee\, adjective:
    Having or showing pluck or courage; brave.
Plucky is originally boxing slang from the 1800s, from the meaning "heart, viscera" as that which is "plucked" from slaughtered livestock.

My bleating yesterday like a sheep waiting to be eviscerated seems to me today to have been an expression of shame about being a member of the unregenerated human race. My friend Yvette (a pseudonym) commented that:

Physical discomfort can make us feel tired, weak, and sensitive. When we read or watch something that touches our heart, we understand it more deeply and might react more strongly to it. When we are weak physically, our brain sometimes becomes more active and we have deeper sympathy for the weak and poor. We may sense the unfairness of the world more. In turn, it can make us feel even tireder.

    Indeed, since Monday I have been very tired, owing somehow to ophthalmological (or neurological) symptoms I experienced that morning. There was a bright arc of white light in my left eye's image, with a faint, quick dispersion of black specks (like a fast-moving flock of crows). My wife took me to the UNC eye clinic when it opened. Doctors there told me that there was no evidence of retinal detachment. The younger one of them said that I actually had less chance of a retinal detachment than he did, for the vitreous fluid in my eyeballs has hardened enough that it has already pulled away from my retinas and so can no longer pull on them (a common cause of retinal detachment, I was given to understand).
    I went to work the next day, but realized immediately upon arriving that I should have stayed home to rest. Feeling exhausted and with a prominent new floater in my left eye, I worked steadily all day on a number of little tasks, one at a time as well as I could manage, until it was time to go up the hill to catch my van ride home.
    I stayed home yesterday, lying down much of the time. And, apparently, ruminating "sensitively" about being weighed down.

Not that I'm feeling any less sensitive today, but it occurred to me a little while ago that my usual attitude toward exploiters (whether of other people or of other animals—or of the earth itself) is anger and condemnation. In short, I fear, a sense of self-righteous indignation.
    I'm not sure which is worse to feel, the sadness of shame or the futile pluckiness of moral superiority. In either case I suffer an awareness of the incessant exploitation that seems to be woven into the coarse fabric of things.
    It doesn't help that Darwinian evolution is sometimes characterized as "the survival of the fittest"—not now that a presumably moral species has evolved.