Today I laughed. I actually laughed or at least grinned several times. Why? Mostly because I do not willingly exist in what most would consider this “normal” world – normal being whatever each individual and group of individuals has determined to be correct and thus normal. Because of my sometimes “out-of-planet” experiences, witnessing the normal, but to me, abnormal, events of the day must cause laughter. Without it, I’m not sure the results.
Most entertaining is when intellectuals(?) wander down roads of philosophical bliss, pointing out the obvious, created by the obvious, for the obvious, but pause in confusion, not understanding such creations, or better yet, intimating that the answer must lie in some unexplored human psyche beyond mortal comprehension. Yikes!
At the root of this laughter, sometimes contrasted with anger and disgust, was a long, sometimes rambling essay of what, in part, was the transformation of human attitudes and perspectives about life in general and living with predators more specifically. The author writes:
We have become tame in Europe, and that is a good thing. Europeans are on the whole no longer wild or savage, as we certainly were a thousand, five hundred, or for that matter sixty-seven years ago. The potential for savagery and bloodthirstiness remains within us, as shown with such dreadful clarity during the war in the former Yugoslavia in 1991?1999. But we are for the most part tame and prefer that state-sanctioned bloodletting on a large scale happen outside the borders of the European Union. And that is, all things considered, a good thing. No one in their right mind would want to go back to the fear and insecurity of anticipated attacks by Vikings, bigoted religious fanatics, or the soldiers of the Axis Powers. The same can be said about our relationship to animals. Most aspects of the living conditions of pets and farm animals are regulated by law in the EU. For wild animals, there are special habitat directives.
My initial reaction to reading this was to ask, what world does this person live in? But then, I realized it wasn’t what world he lived in but my own existence shuns the false world he displays. While what he writes certainly may reflect his perceptions of things, I believe it only substantiates the success of the work of those who control this world and all that is in it. There must be considered the absurdity or insanity that, “state-sanctioned bloodletting” is acceptable beyond the bounds of the newly perceived “tameness.” Talk about living a life of blinded ignorance. To accept the premise of, “No one in their right mind would want to go back to the fear and insecurity of anticipated attacks by Vikings, bigoted religious fanatics, or the soldiers of the Axis Powers,” is to accept a lie and live it. More people would live in fear if they realized that all of this still exists today but is well-hidden. Media control and manipulation, outright lies and deceit, propaganda and control prohibits us from seeing the terrible things that are going on all around us.
The author admits, and accurately so, that this same attitude of blissful blindness and the denial of existing savagery, carries over into how people want to distinguish themselves and their coexistence with animals, both wild and domestic.
To this the writer states:
But something has been lost in the advance of civilization. In pace with the introduction of the refrigerator, hot running water, bathrooms with subfloor heating, and cable TV, our relationship to things wild has changed, especially our attitudes towards the predators among us. The bear, the wolf, the wolverine, the lynx: all have been transformed in our minds into symbolic, anthropomorphized abstractions. It is human nature to do so, and in a way, one could argue that this has been the case for much longer than since the end of World War II. Nevertheless, the already simplified traits have become more starkly black and white in modern, highly urbanized societies.
From the perspective of one suffering from “out-of-planet” syndrome, a serious argument could and should be made about whether or not civilization has advanced or regressed. There is no arguing the claim that “attitudes toward predators,” has changed, certainly, that man has established most animals as “symbolic, anthropomorphized abstractions” to a point where animals are given equal or superior rights to man and are always discussed with terms using human identification.
We know that out of World Wars I and II, the rapid growth of understanding the human mind and how to control and manipulate it, was exploited, for all the wrong reasons. How did it become possible that our minds see things in a completely different way than how our parents taught us and their parents taught them?
But is this really human nature to see animals from this perverse perspective? I don’t think so. It is learned or probably, in this case, planned programming of our minds in order that changes forced onto people for sinister reasons by perverts with more to gain and without one care for the welfare of any animal…or even you for that matter.
The author touches on one of the reasons for the changes in attitude when he writes:
Out in the country, that argument does not hold full sway, at least not in the areas where the predators are actually found. Country people’s empirical knowledge runs deeper and is often — though not always — more complex and objective than city people’s. The problem with European attitudes towards “our” predators, however, is that most Europeans live in cities and not in the countryside.
And the plan, as it appears to me, is to work toward changing the dynamics of human population densities so that urban dwellers surpass in numbers those of the rural world. For certainly their exists differing attitudes and perspectives between the two cultures. It would make perfect sense that if someone or group of someones was interested in control they would work using whatever means possible to grow the numbers of whichever side was ideologically prepared to sacrifice themselves for the cause. This may sound a bit extreme, but is it in reality? When you consider the words, the attitudes, the hate and the anger being perpetuated throughout, often targeted or presented as urban against suburban, somebody must have an important task to undertake.
We are but duped pawns!
