promoting peace and understanding

Later yesterday morning when the morning sun was screaming in I looked at Sweetie’s eyes which were the narrowest of slits and suddenly they got even narrower and she froze rigid as a rock. There was a bird on the balcony railing. She slunk down into stalking mode and she got to within maybe ten feet of the railing and she stopped dead still. She didn’t know what to do.

I have heard it said all my life that if Mom doesn’t teach kitten, kitten never learns to kill. It seems kind of odd that a cat would be born with all the instincts to stalk a bird, but the ones on killing it and eating it are left to be learned out of the womb, but then maybe they are too technical to be ruled by genes, maybe it’s something you can only learn hands on.

In school they taught us that non human animals are basically just a collection of instincts, if an instinct doesn’t tell them to do something they don’t do anything. We on the other hand are born pretty much blank slates and everything we need to do, we need to be taught. Well we are damned helpless when we are born, and stay that way for an awful long time, almost seems like some kind of mistake on the part of mother nature, but then our gargantuan brains kick in and we can’t be beat. Our only enemy is each other.

Wonder if it had to be that way. We are very competitive it is true, but we also very cooperative. What if whenever two groups of hunter gatherers came across each other they sat down across from each other and decided how to increase the output of the valley so that there would be enough for both tribes and set up boundaries where they could share and share alike? Wars seem so wasteful and destructive, you wonder where we would be now if we didn’t have them.

But I have to tell you I am always a little skeptical about that whole idea of progress. Were we any happier before we had cars, happier when instead of twenty miles an hour they could go seventy, will we be happier still when they go seven hundred. If I look back, I have to say that it is much easier writing this stupid blog than having to push a pen across paper and find an envelope and a stamp and mail it out and wait to get one back. I suppose a future me would think how difficult all the typing is and be glad that they can just crystalize their thoughts and stare at a spot on their super duper google glasses and send an exchange of thoughts that way.

But then you have to wonder beaming our thoughts through wormholes or typing and emailing or snail mailing, would the fastest method have gotten us anywhere closer to our goal of promoting peace and understanding? That is our goal isn’t it?

In a sense you are right, Mother Nature in her hard but fair way doesn’t really play favorites, unlike that awful God who is always playing favorites. Like when the church bus crashes and the lone survivor says it was God who saved him, implying that God didn’t much give a shit about all the other bozos on the bus.

I don’t want to talk about the Fort Hood incident except to say how foolish it is to base an argument on an incident. Maybe gun control is a good idea and maybe it is a bad idea, but to seize on this incident, or any incident to prove your point is just stupid. Maybe Trayvon was a victim, or maybe he had it coming, but race relations are the same before and after the incident, so talk about them and not the incident.