Androcles Says

Androcles Says

RAMPANT KILLING OF WILD HORSES, BURROS AND WOLVES - Speak to the new Secretary of the Interior

Comment to Secretary Sally Jewell:  https://secure2.convio.net/ida/site/Advocacy?pagename=homepage&page=UserAction&id=2437&autologin=true


Androcles said:  The "wild" animals are as valuable and intrinsic a part of the American landscape as any of its historic buildings and monuments.  American advisors continually plead with emerging countries not to destroy their native wildlife because of their irreplaceable value, not just in terms of tourism but in many other ways.  Will we be more ignorant than the emerging cultures we counsel?.

U.S. FORESTRY ALLOWS LOGGING TO DESTROY 800 YEAR OLD TREES

U.S. Forestry allows logging of old growth trees in the Tongass Forest, our nation's largest forest.  Go to http://act.alaskawild.org/sign/Tongass_pcomments_3-20-13/?akid=488.39845.TMS5ww&rd=1&t=3    to add your comments.

 I said: 

These old trees are treasures of our country, of the world, and of the planet.  They are irreplaceable.  In recent times we humans have begun to recognize that trees and other green things sustain the air of the earth -- without it we cannot breathe, we cannot live.  Additionally the old trees --, just like the old virtues of care and kindness and looking beyond the moment -- teach us by example and give us a unique way to see and reflect upon present time, past time and future time.  Just as they are inextricably linked to the air we breathe they are inextricably linked to our spirits.  To kill them is similar to saying, as a culture, that we will kill all our elders.

Harvard Finally Agrees to Close its Primate "Facility"

Harvard will close the sprawling unclean and horrendous primate facility, affecting at least 2,000 monkeys.  Now the fight will be to persuade this institution of higher learning to allow the survivors to go to sanctuaries rather than selling them to other research facilities. I wrote to Harvard's president and to the facility: 

“At last this school has agreed to stop the atavistic, inhuman and ignorant torturing of the animals who are the nearest relatives to human beings. I was relieved to hear it but noted the size and duration of the effort necessary to bring it about. 

Closing the lab is obviously the right thing to do but it comes late, after years of torture, abuse and killing. The next step is to arrange for these sentient beings to go to sanctuary rather than selling them to other laboratories. What will Harvard do?

In a more reasonable world all the staff and particularly the leaders and "professors" connected to this facility would go through an extended period of mourning, atonement, and re-education about their status and their thinking in regard to the world in which they live.

 Harvard University triumphantly regards itself as a leader and a light for the entire world -- how many other medieval and unnecessary enclaves does the university support? Time to look. Time to see. Time to wake up. Thank you.”

On the White House site and Facebook I submitted the following reactions to the State of the Union Address:

China Altman The lack of emphasis on climate change and the welfare of the planet itself were glaring omissions. Re-examine traditional triumphalism -- it's a confabulation made up of denial of reality and blindness to new and necessary visions. Not just as Americans but as humans we must live within the whole of humanity as guardians caring for the earth. We live WITHIN not above or outside the web of life. 

 

As president it would be wise for you to meditate upon this. It's difficult but citizens are more weary than you realize of the same old cliches. We need truly new visions, and recognition of the greatest reality: what to do about mankind's destruction of our only home, the earth. How many think you will be among those chosen when space ships go to another home, after this one is uninhabitable? How many think about the reality that your children and grandchildren -- if not yourselves -- will be alive when the waters rise?

 

-0-

 

He did state that we can't solve our financial problems on the backs of senior seniors and the poorest citizens.  I commented: 

 

"We slipped into a kind of capitalism that allowed corporations to become "people," meaning - in reality - they became separate nations within our nation, with their own rules, laws, and privileges that allowed them to be excluded from the laws and ideals of the larger society. Admit they are now imperial units. Bring them back onto the tax rolls and back into the Union. Think of Lincoln.  His abiding idea was preservation of the Union, with participation of all parts, including especially those who disagreed, in order to work out the ideals of democracy within the inevitable and useful contentions of competing ideas and people."

 

CHARM CAN ENDANGER

Many people find delight in the Jacquie Lawson ecards developed by a talented British artist. I like their dancing teddy bears, their signature cat, the two dogs and the continuous representation in so many ways of a world of wonder and innocence, a quite sophisticated world that offers the kind of soothing and solace we wish could exist. Or that, in our dreams, we dreamed of as children. 

 

 Just now when I went to their site, I saw they are offering a desktop animation, their delightful version of a circus with dancing elephants and so on. Oh oh.

 

Though they don’t intend it, they are enlisting in the romanticism of circuses. I wanted to speak up but to keep my thoughts within their so amiable world of whimsy and beauty. Here is what I said: 

 

“Your cards and the Advent Calendar have brought me much joy. However, I am concerned about your Circus offering which I have just previewed. While it’s beautifully done, I ask you to re-consider its present form. I am among those who feel deeply that elephants and other "wild" animals should not be exploited in circuses. They are prisoners, ill-treated. They can not sign on or agree. The social life necessary to their well-being is not possible.

 

 

"Many countries now are passing laws forbidding the use of these animals in circuses and supporting another kind of circus that stars humans (who can consent and who are paid) or companion animals such as dogs who work only with their guardians. Although I'm sure you do not intend to promote the abuse of elephants and tigers and others, yet presenting a romantic circus according to the out-of-date version of the past is sending a message that indirectly supports that abuse. Though you haven’t intended it, the very success of your considerable and beguiling charm is indirectly enlisted in the anachronistic and atavistic meme about circuses and the archaic world represented, part of which is based on the mistreatment of animals. Thank you for reading this. I admire your company VERY much.”

 

Not just anger but charm can harm. There are several relevant quotes which I can't just now call to mind.  They all say something like this:   Of all things be most careful of life.

http://www.jacquielawson.com/thecards.asp?c=3349101&hdn=0

Police Who Kill and the Zeitgeist

       In Mason Ohio police Taser-ed and kicked a mentally ill man to death. In Boulder a policeman killed a community's pet elk. In Brighton Colorado a policeman killed a man's pet dog. In White Plains NY police killed an elderly man in his home after his medical alert sounded.  Black comedians joke that a black man can never reach into his pocket if police are near -- "They will kill you." After Trayvon Martin was killed in Florida will teen-agers have to stop wearing hoodies? Will some company begin manufacturing hoodies with the words "Don't Kill Me" embroidered on the back? 

        Stories of killer police are reported almost daily. Commonsense observance of our culture tells us there are many other killings and assaults not reported.

      It's easy to have an angry knee jerk reaction: Bad Police!  However, while I have the same knee jerk at first, I have to think about the police as they exist within, hired by and enforced by the zeitgeist, the spirit of our age and society. I think we need to think about the hidden and unacknowledged messages they are receiving from the world we have helped to create, that we create every day.

       Ever since I was in the civil rights and anti-war protests of the 1960s I've been reflecting about the police violence I saw close to me in Boston. I began wearing a hard hat when covering Boston Common demonstrations because the police waded in with night sticks. When they brought those sticks down on the heads of the kids near me I could sometimes hear the skull crack. It was just luck and vigilance that kept me away from those sticks. The police used a killing force with the sticks, I never saw anything resembling just a prod. We know from films and photographs of the demonstrations in southern states that the same violence was common. Mostly the dead are reported. No reports -- in Boston or any of the southern states -- detail the crippled, those injured beyond the hope of healing.

         I watched the police at the demonstrations, both to try to keep from being beaten and to see what I could find out. Their faces usually looked maddened and fierce, with determination, as they brought down the night sticks. The demonstrators usually were slender and young, dressed in light weight clothing, carrying nothing. The police were in thick military type uniforms, boots, armed with guns and sticks. The imbalance was dramatic.

         When I lived as a journalist in Hungary during the Russian occupation I experienced and saw what it felt like in an occupied country. The Russian solders, with their rifles, stood on street corners. The posture of every single individual on the streets changed from that you saw in their homes. You could see in the bearing of their heads and shoulders that they felt themselves to be in danger from a force they could not affect or control, a force that could kill them at random, with no repercussions possible, no matter what the circumstances.

          Reports, stories and observations tell us that this is often the situation of young men of color in the American society. There are also, of course, other classifications of those who are not entitled to the "protect and serve" ethos of police work: prostitutes, the homeless, the poorly dressed, the mentally ill, teen-agers wearing expressive clothing. When you expand the classification to the "animal" community, it's open sesame. All stray or unaccompanied cats, dogs and companion animals of any kind, all "wild" animals may be killed. A woman who adopted a wolf puppy in one of the western states had to move to a remote area because of threats from both neighbors and police that they would shoot the pup through her fence.

          In every circumstance, human and animal, the police have a procedure:  report that the victim was attacking them or scaring them. If it goes to court there is even an inside argot, an invented word:  "testa-lie," as in "I have to go testa-lie in court today."

           However, from watching the police and from reflecting on European actions against the Jews -- study shows that the brutality and killing was not alone from Germany, not only from Germans -- I think about the zeitgeist. We all live in it, no matter how independent we may think we are from it. We all create it or allow it to be created. We are never entirely innocent of it.

           For the police who are killing, I wish we could consider them in the context of our persistent national definition of the "man" as a powerful agent who expresses and proves his primary characteristic by the act of killing, by the position of being able to dominate to the point of killing. Sure, there are the other ideas and scenes of the "gentle" man, the ahh-h-h moments of a man cuddling a baby or a puppy. Just one moment: why the ah's?  Why isn't that "normal."

           While there are millions of instances and discussions in government, politics, law and religions about whether and how society can regulate the hormonal affects of estrogen for women, there is no discussion about the concomitant hormonal affects of testosterone for men. In fact, the testosterone-ruled man is held up repeatedly as a hero in films and other presentations. Looked at from another point of view, these men may be considered as being on the verge of pathology. Sure there may be a time for killing, as there may be a time for everything. I don't know. But why did we create a zeitgeist in which we -- more often than we would think -- tacitly approve of police as killers? There are nations, perhaps primarily the Scandinavian ones, where police are not expected to be killers.

          Thinking about our zeitgeist in which we brutalize and distort the definitions of men -- and women -- we need to also consider police killings in the context of our national obsession (illness) about guns. The matter of killer police is not separate from the gun rights conflict.

          Apart from that, what to do with the police who "illegally" kill? Could we think about how to be kind to them, how to help them. Killing is never neutral. If it doesn't change a person's life in some way, that is a cause for serious concern. Next,relieve them of duty, perhaps a term of imprisonment. Most important, intensive and extensive therapy to be provided and required. Maybe a lifelong pension and a prohibition from being hired for police work. Although this last is a bit frightening -- we must not be seen as providing a guaranteed pension for police who kill. That would open the door even wider. Daunting questions.

          I am only a person looking out the window at a tree. Please don't kill me.