Control Freaks

Why as humans, do we constantly question our purpose on the planet? Why is it that we have to create, build, discover, learn, explore, finish, manipulate, regulate, control and decide the roles of every living thing on earth? Did this all come from the Bible, the Qur'an, the Bhagavad Gita, the I-Ching, and all the other religious texts? Where did we get such a superiority complex?

Other life forms just seem to be content to live in the natural world, to exist, satisfied by a good meal, a good nap, a litter of little ones to take care of, just kinda taking it easy. Then of course, there are those  issues like finding food and surviving their next "around the corner" predator, but hey, that's pretty much things we have to deal with too.  Our finding food, actually comes in the form of finding the money to afford the food, and our survival, well, we all know that our biggest predators are our very own brothers - as in humankind.

Another school shooting becomes just another news story, good for a couple of days, maybe drag it out for a week if there are enough deaths or injured. Actually, the dead and injured don't really count that much, we like to focus on the killer, the whack job, the mentally ill, the sick bastard (or sick bitch) in some cases. Write a book about it, better yet, see the movie.

You start losing faith, you start to fear sending your kids off to school, you start skipping trips to the mall, you feel nervous and scared walking in your home alone, and it doesn't even have to be dark.

No, this isn't a fire drill

I don't know the answers. But I do know, that with all the good humankind does, and I'm not discounting all the good we do, it gets overshadowed when this kind of thing happens. This post isn't about gun control, or knife control, or how too much sugar and weird chemicals can poison our bodies ~ no, I think it is simply that we're not as grand as we think we are.  We are not as evolved and civilized as we think we are.

They say in nature that an animal only kills when he needs to eat or is defending himself from another animal who needs to eat.  He doesn't usually just get pissed off and take out a few of his fellow breed or any other animal, for that matter. Unless of course, there can be rare cases of mental illness, which has happened, especially when we use them for our own entertainment, taking them out of their own habitat and enclosing them in one of ours.  Yes, I'm talking SeaWorld, with their small enclosures and forced training, tearing them away from their families; Circuses, where we make them perform and jump through hoops; and Zoos ~ nothing more than animal prisons. And we, nothing more than control freaks.

Animal cruelty on display

This morning all kinds of things are going through my head - and I'm sick of hearing about all of this gruesome behavior from my kind, as I'm sure you are.  I am pretty sure that of all the animals on the planet, we are the most messed up. And with every dreaded news story, with another tear shed in front of the TV screen, I can't tell if it is my numb mode or my survival mode that is being kicked up another notch.