Before, I saw basically good people trying and often failing to do the right thing. Now, I see the apes stealing each others' fruit, abandoning the injured one to the tigers, and raping each other.
If you'll pardon my simplistic way of thinking:
The question every human must answer after coming to this revelation is: how am I gonna respond to it?
After all, as far as anyone can tell, the apes don't care. The tigers don't care. The fruit doesn't care. They're all just acting according to their natures. The scorpion stings the frog halfway across the river and dooms them both to a watery grave since, well, it's a scorpion, right?
Of course, no scorpion ever told this fable. Only humans tell fables--again, as far as anyone knows--because caring and thinking and wondering and storytelling only enter in when the human brain gets involved. Nobody else in the animal kingdom is gonna look at the animal behavior going on in the vicinity and contemplate the rightness or wrongness of it.
But after contemplating it, what next? Descend into despair? Join some doomsday cult or other? Rail at the world from atop a soapbox? Write talking animal stories? These and all the other options--sainthood, knighthood, white hood with a couple eyeholes cut into it--are available only to humans, for good or for bad. And no one way is gonna work for everybody. Heck, no one way is gonna work for an individual person: that's why LiveJournal gives us so many slots for icons to set beside our posts.
Or as John Prine says: "It's a big old goofy world."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-10 02:51 am (UTC)If you'll pardon my simplistic way of thinking:
The question every human must answer after coming to this revelation is: how am I gonna respond to it?
After all, as far as anyone can tell, the apes don't care. The tigers don't care. The fruit doesn't care. They're all just acting according to their natures. The scorpion stings the frog halfway across the river and dooms them both to a watery grave since, well, it's a scorpion, right?
Of course, no scorpion ever told this fable. Only humans tell fables--again, as far as anyone knows--because caring and thinking and wondering and storytelling only enter in when the human brain gets involved. Nobody else in the animal kingdom is gonna look at the animal behavior going on in the vicinity and contemplate the rightness or wrongness of it.
But after contemplating it, what next? Descend into despair? Join some doomsday cult or other? Rail at the world from atop a soapbox? Write talking animal stories? These and all the other options--sainthood, knighthood, white hood with a couple eyeholes cut into it--are
available only to humans, for good or for bad. And no one way is gonna work for everybody. Heck, no one way is gonna work for an individual person: that's why LiveJournal gives us so many slots for icons to set beside our posts.
Or as John Prine says: "It's a big old goofy world."
That Annoying Mike Guy