When I was a young adult, I told my Mohawk friend, Ray Fadden, that I was disturbed by the brutality that lays at the base of life and told him that I had observed that all life proceeds by wreckage of other life. How could it be otherwise in a closed energy system such as we have on Earth?
Thus, life constantly creates an inordinate amount of death. It lays in a foundation of death.
I mentioned that even the act of eating means, for example, that we consume the energy and nutrients that other life made for itself and we do so by matter-of-factly slaughtering other life. it is simply a routine action wherein we fry, bake, broil and cut up, and consume the flesh with little thought for the the life that we, day after day, kill.
I went on to add that we do it with lots of life and not only for obtainment of food. For instance, consider the toilet paper and other paper products, such as books and wooden furniture, derived from decimated forests and destruction, indirectly, of all lives in those forests as they flee from the loggers and the cut-down condition wherein their homes and food sources are destroyed. Then consider about that which one’s home, clothes, bedding, other objects in one’s home and at place of work are made.
Further consider that the higher that one lives in life on the socio-economic scale, the more resources that s/he uses and the more destruction that s/he personally dishes out to the natural world through that turning of the world, the very biosphere, into natural products. Add, then, the indirect poisons left to pollute waterways and air — poisons like agricultural runoff, dioxin from paper making, plastics winding up in oceans, poisons from every day use of common household products that sicken river and ocean life in the madness of over-consumption!
So it is all too much for me to subsume, I told him. I was overwhelmed in horror!
Then I even went further to lay onto the overall situation more. He was that trustworthy to me and understood me well!
So going onward with him, I mentioned that I was sad that every day, I destroy an inordinate amount of microbial life, such as dust mites, bacteria and viruses of which many are benign. I went further to add that the amount of life that was killed on my behalf since I was born is mind boggling, especially since life is predicated on this endless slaughter involving both intentional and unintentional types of life.
Like a pitbull dog with a rat in its mouth and shaking it past the dead point, I went even more forcefully forward to add that the deaths in the Adirondacks of NY (where he lived) due to acid rain — i.e., of loons, toads, leeches and more — greatly scare me and harm me due to compassion and love of the creatures in the ADKs. I simply hate their deaths from my species as I love the way leeches curl under water in an elaborate ballet, the way loons cry and the way toads are so bumpy and hop to get out of my way.
What is our species doing? So much wanton destruction and I hate being a part of it, I told him! Then I got teary eyed in overwhelming dismay, sorrow and frustration.
Yes, I was on a tear (either meaning and pronunciation of the word). I let it all loose to him since I trusted him implicitly. He was one of the few people to whom I could fully bare my inner self without fear of being misunderstood, ridiculed, chastised or belittled, misunderstood or dismissed for being too odd and different from the mainstream position.
With most people, one can only be a little open and mostly cordial while polite, but only superficial. Not so Ray! So I let him have it all — all that was on my mind and in my disturbance of spirit!
He sat in silence for a while reflecting on my grief and alarm. Then he told me an Algonquin Native American prayer. It is a very old one and goes something like this:
Oh deer, I am so sorry that I had to kill you, but I have three hungry children at home who will die if I do not feed them.
I am sorry that my arrows caused you pain. I am sorry and apologize to your children for taking your life from them.
My life, too will be taken one day, as will the lives of my children, and we will return to where you have now gone. Yet for now, please accept my thankfulness for killing you for our need. Please accept my gratefulness for keeping my family alive for now. I owe you an incalculable debt for serving and continuing our lives.
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So every day I say something like this to the world for the taking of life and the other sorts of destruction that I do each day. I apologize to the life that goes down to serve my own staying alive.
Of course, it doesn’t bring back the dead that cannot even hear my thoughts towards them. How could a dead pig turned into bacon hear me or a carrot? How could cotton turned into towels, clothes and bedding know my feelings?
Yet the stance helps me to acknowledge the true meaning of my being alive. It helps me to try to limit resource use. It helps me to define my identity and my position toward life outside of my small being so limited in time and space. It, thus, helps brings me my fullness of self. It brings compassion and connectivity with the ALL of which I am a little part and which supports my life. So I am happy to learn the deer prayer from Ray and transmute it to suit my condition.
The fact is that from an evolutionary standpoint, all life forms are driven to compete with each other and destroy the world to stay alive. Such an understanding is driven into us and has laid a foundation for interaction with the world since life began on the Earth. Its underpinnings, therefore, are deeply embedded in nearly all species. and if not for some of them, they will not survive.
For example, a deer will run from a gray foggy cloud of hungry mosquitoes while wildly crashing through the woods at a top speed mustered from within itself to get away. Then with every millimeter of its body covered, it will fall down with blood loss to die. (This event happened. It is simply another act of eating.)
Another deer, pregnant, will succumb to a pack of wild dogs, which pulls it down by the throat after which they will gnaw through its tender soft belly while it is still conscious. Imagine the act since, as a higher level mammal, the nervous system and pain capacity is similar to that of humans. (This event happened. It is simply another act of eating.)
Now imagine her being zapped directly in the eyeball by a taser in an attempt to get her to stand and then, when she couldn’t do so, being dragged by the neck by a chain or a rope while lying down. Yes, she was yanked forward to the butcher tasked to slit her throat. ( This event happened. It is simply another act of eating.)
Calif. meat packer to pay $317M over abuse, recall – USA Today
California: Deal Reached in Suit Over Animal Abuse – The New York …
Nov 27, 2013 – The video led to the record-breaking recall of 143 million pounds of beef. The so-called downer cows are not supposed to be slaughtered for .
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A female spider being “romanced” by a male will often eat him before copulation takes place. Some males do manage to do procreative action, but get eaten shortly thereafter, although not all of them since some are nimble to get away after successful procreation.
BEYOND HORROR: They ate cats, sawdust, wallpaper paste…even …
Sep 2, 2011 – The German siege of Leningrad lasted 900 days from September, …. for cannibalism; 586 of them were executed for murdering their victims.
Meanwhile some of the male spiders have to be quick and positioned just right to not have their faces ripped off by the females fangs during the act. This is the case, for example, with the solitary wolf spider, which lives underground and meets another of its kind above surface only during mating urges, apparently. … Since the females do not want the male attention, they can get quite vicious! (Seem familiar in some human circumstances?)
Another spider types that’s interesting has a female immediately injecting the male with paralytic poison after the procreative act.. Oh, yes, he stays alive and supposedly aware of all that is happening, including on a a nervous system level wherein he may experience pain. Then she lays her eggs deeply inside of him and after they are born. the babies eat their way out of his body, their father’s flesh, as he slowly dies so as to create a new generation of females and males to carry out the same process in times to come, and generation by generation ahead.
This action in turn reminds me of the praying mantis female, which rips the head off of the male and which in turn causes him to have an erection so that she can copulate with his dying or dead body. Her offspring carry out the same action and it is successful for evolutionary based furtherance.
So please don’t try to see anything having to do with morality, altruism, kindness or compassion, fairness and equality in evolution regardless of whether a God or Gods made evolution or not. While acts of incredible caring and self-sacrifice, even of one’s own life, do arise as a byproduct and a support for some species relative to evolution in support of genotype, the bottom line is survival and procreation for each seceding progeny of one’s kind, and it has always been so as a basis for actions, even in dogs.
Clever: On account, meercats will raid the den of another meercat tribe, overcome the stationary guard positioned at the den and rush into it to find and kill all of the babies located therein. They will claw and bite them to death while, thereby, getting rid of competition for food sources and territory while the rest of the tribe except for the guard are out feeding.
If this behavior doesn’t sound much like humans, then consider this:The murder in Rwanda wherein people fought over resources and land. They even killed members of their own tribal groups to gain advantages, including children .
Yes, babies are deliberately and routinely killed by our own species, too:
US online sales will hit a record $107 billion this holiday season
Nov 2, 2017 – US online sales will hit a record $107 billion this holiday season … Retailers begin to blast out Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals … The National Retail Federation projects that U.S. nonstore holiday sales this season (Nov …
The Worst Black Friday Injuries and Deaths of All Time – Ranker
holidays The Worst Black Friday Injuries and Deaths of All Time … A few facts to convey this incident: over 2,000 people trampled into the store five minutes ..
1.,
Wal-Mart Deathly Stampede2.,
Pregnant Woman MiscarriedThe eight-months-pregnant woman was probably waiting to buy stuff for her soon-to-be newborn baby. Instead, she miscarried. The same group of people that knocked the doors off their hinges also managed to create the most brutal abortion imaginable.
3., Target [Store] Shoppers Step Over Dying Man
4., Guys Shoot Each Other
Excerpt:
Black Friday. Toys R Us. Shooting deaths. Normally, people would never think of stringing those words up in the same sentence. Well, maybe the first two, but shooting deaths?
However, that’s exactly what happened the same day of the above Wal-Mart stampede. On the opposite side of the coast in Palm Desert, CA, two women got into a fight. No one knows why, but plenty of witnesses reported it was a bloody brawl. Bloody enough to incite their male companions to pull out their trusty hand-guns and shoot each other. God Bless America.
All hell broke loose.The crowds ran out screaming from the store while the two shooters squared off and cocked their gun. One man failed so he ran through the aisles while the other guy shot at him. Eventually, they got to the cash register and exchanged multiple shots before dying.
5., Black Friday Shoppers Trample Girl
… The list ends at forty awful incidents!!!
In relation: Earth Overshoot Day, previously known as Ecological Debt Day, is the calculated illustrative calendar date on which humanity’s resource consumption for the year exceeds Earth’s capacity to regenerate those resources that year. Wikipedia
How DARE we participate in this overshoot activity! Note the trend in the chart below as our population keeps going upward in number and more people accrue wealth or go into debt. Note the trend as people are lifted out of poverty and into ever higher socio-economic status.
Without doubt, I’m sure that a large portion of our species is demented and irrational. Not only do the above described incidents and occurrences provide ample anecdotal proof of sorts, but how about people who can’t even feed themselves as a couple keeping having children, about one a year, when they, obviously can’t tend themselves even in terms of basics like food and clothes? Is that reasonable and rational?
Are we this much driven by evolutionary precursors that we have largely foregone common sense in many areas of our interactions with the world around us? Who knows?
They, apparently, have forgotten to cherish other life forms as they breed out of control. They have also forgotten about the holidays being sacred and not about consumption. They also have forgotten that
“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.” – American Indian proverbPerhaps they need to practice saying some sort of prayer or meditation such as Ray Fadden taught me. Certainly many people around the world need to learn better understandings about the meanings of their actions, especially the assorted acts of violence and ruin that they undertake day by day by simply being alive to use up the world as this is the foundation of life.