Wetiko Means Cannibal

This post brought to you courtesy of a word-byte conversation I've been having with my son on Facebook.

Here's a police officer punching a teen aged girl in the face. Her crime? Jaywalking.

And here is a police officer shooting a dog dead, as the dog wags his tail furiously at the officer. The dog's crime? Resisting arrest, apparently.

I get so angry I could bite heads off, and so sad I could just put my head in my hands and cry, and cry, and cry.

The pathologies of civilisation are both acute and widespread, and there's nothing I can do about it.

Or is there?

Last night, I suffered a nightmare. A large, threatening man was trying to get me to do something I didn't want to - drive a passenger bus. My son, Shevek, was to be tortured if I did not comply. In the dream, I felt all the anger, all the rage, which witnessing things like those last 2 videos normally brings on. I flung myself at this huge man - who, now that I think about it, was backed by several equally-threatening members of his family - and tried to kick, gouge and tear at him. It didn't have much effect.

And I knew, in this dream, that the man was supported by and representative of a worldwide religion.

My son and I hatched a plan to put an end to the man. Several other people joined in....and this is where the dream ended.

I know that the human animal is not the only one who kills and maims when it's not hungry or threatened - goodness knows I've seen my dogs take down birds often enough, plus I've seen lions literally 'playing with their food'.  I know that life necessitates death, and that we kill for various reasons.

But what is needling me here is the widespread commonality of such behaviour. Give a human a license to kill in his society, and more and more often, he will. And it's becoming so damned indiscriminate.

As if we're lashing out at something we can't quite see.

What plan have we got, people, to put an end to this vast pathology of civilised humanity? This sickness which devours planet and animals,plants and elements- all living things, and shits the waste out upon its own living room floor: what action shall we take to cure it?

Or shall we, as I thought to myself early this morning - dressing in the cold predawn because someone had tried to dig up the electrical cabling to sell it, again - shall we just see an end to it, in the finality of mass genocide?