Throwing It Away When It Grows Too Big
I’ve spent much of the day today - the first one I’ve had to post here for a while now - caring for three two-day-old orphan kittens. I have no idea where their mother is, but my family and I can’t stand to see these creatures starve to death. There was a fourth, but he died before we could do much for him, and one of the remaining three refuses to eat from a bottle even though he’s clearly hungry.
Imagine my disgust through this experience to read that in Puerto Rico, people’s cherished pets have been callously thrown off a bridge by a man hired to collect them and transport them to a shelter. At least 50 former pets were put into a common grave near the bridge by a local resident, and at least six badly injured pets were reunited with their owners.
The problem is: someone didn’t understand that the majority of these removed pets were not in violation of any rules in the public housing project in Barceloneta on Puerto Rico’s north coast. But the problem doesn’t stop with pets with homes, or even with animals in general.
Here in Los Angeles - the homeless capital of America - 40,144 people are living on the streets, the majority of the 73,000 people - 10,000 of whom are minors - who roam the byways of LA County seeking something resembling more of a life than being allowed to sleep on city streets without the cops hustling you to move to someone else’s town.
Besides those already mentioned, there are also 24,505 who suffer from a mental illness, 8,453 military veterans unable to re-adapt to civilian life, and nearly 7,200 victims of domestic abuse who have nowhere to go.
It’s enough to make one scream out “What about that “compassionate conservatism” we used to hear so much about?? When is it going to do something for these people???
The silence is deafening.
Everyday in my hometown, I see another dog who has clearly been abandoned. It sits along a street somewhere in town, watching as the cars go by as if waiting to hear the master’s vehicle approach. It breaks my heart that I can do nothing for them to justify their remaining hopeful of rescue.
But people who dispose of pets so callously also seem to dispose of their own young. We have a tremendous vandalism problem in my town, and thanks to connections with the local school district, I hear about the kids who spent all night causing trouble coming to school unable to stay awake. One has to ask, “Where are the parents? Don’t they care?” They must not, for no one seems to ever get these kids to change their ways.
I’m told that these kids feel that they aren’t going to live long enough to worry about the things we’re told are important - education, civil behavior toward others, gainful employment, etc. None of that is real to these kids, and they come from a diverse background whose commonality lies in the willful ignorance of those who belong to this realm of hopelessness. Some of these kids have it much better than I had when I was that age, and yet it isn’t enough for them. They still want more, and they want it all handed to them - or else they will just take it from someone weaker.
I can understand where many of these kids get it from. About half of their lives have been spent watching the Bush administration try to take oil from a country which on paper couldn’t stand up a day to an invasion of the world’s remaining superpower. Sad how that worked out, and sadder yet how the super-cons have yet to face the fact that they can’t achieve their goals of world domination without resorting to drafting the kids of those who still support them.
I really do have a point to this rambling dissertation, and that is how quickly we as a nation lost what few values we still had after almost thirty years of “conservative” corporatist rule once George W. Bush and his cronies stole power through brute force. Like the kids I described above, they couldn’t get it handed to them by the voters, so they took it away from the legitimate winner by force. Nothing was allowed to stand in the way of taking power, for nothing else had any value. Over 3800 Americans have lost their valuable lives in pursuit of the mad dream of world dominance while the rest of the world is clearly tired of waiting for sanity to return to our land.
Such an example has trickled down - about the only thing which has! - and made a strong impression on the weak-minded who go along to get along because they have nothing they value enough to defend. Few of their desires are to be denied. Up until recently, these folks could have all the opulent trappings of the wealthy for only a small amount down, and a small amount each month, until the house could be refinanced one more time to cover all those costs. And if something got a slight blemish of some kind, toss it away and go get another one! There’s a newer model out now anyway!
Admittedly, this doesn’t work so easily with living beings, for they have a tendency to find their way home once they get hungry. So one hops into one’s car to dump one’s animals far enough away that they can’t find their way back, or one becomes so abusive to one’s kids that they find someplace else to hang out. Then you move, or at least change the locks, and pretend that your pets or kids just ran away. Imagine that!
When a society reaches the point we have, when nothing is of any value because its citizens had it all handed to them, the vultures begin to gather, ready to pick the bones of a dying community. The recent purchase of a stake in NASDAQ and in the London Stock Exchange by Bahrain and Dubai economic interests (owned by their respective governments) should give one pause, but it doesn’t. The fact that the Russians and the Chinese are interested in a piece of BP, Shell, and ExxonMobil at a time when crude prices are rising should, and won’t. The fact that Iran now collects over 83% of its oil sales in currencies that aren’t called dollars, and that several countries either have, or are going to, delink their currencies from the dollar should mean something to those who survive through their investment in the exploitation of other people’s labor, but they remain oblivious.
I guess if ignorance is bliss, obliviousness is Nirvana.
Because we as a society remain obstinately opposed to being responsible about anything, we are losing - nay, discarding - our freedoms and liberties via hostile neglect. We are throwing away our traditions and values because they aren’t convenient to us any longer. It all became too big for us to handle as we mired ever deeper into instant gratification.
So we threw it all away.
It won’t be there when we will need it, and only then will the cost of the loss sink in.