Miscellaneous thoughts of rape, kindness to animals, and the Israeli lesson.
I was thinking of the recent bill by Senator Boxer which will resupply weapons stockpiles in Israel. I was thinking of this in the context of what it tells the rest of us U.S. citizens. The U.N. has been clear about the cruelty of the Palestinian massacres, and the bill our U.S. government has created in response is one that enables more of those actions.
I was thinking of some of the recent rape discussions, where assumptions are made about all men in the context of the phrase rape culture, and what it tells those of us who don't act in those ways. Of the few men around which a culture is broadbrushed that includes all men regardless of personal behavior.
I was thinking of the school to prison pipeline, where students are set up to fail early in life so they may fund the privatized prison industrial complex. Of students who are expelled numerous reasons, most often asserted for bringing weapons or drugs to schools, but which the real truth is that in private schools the most minor of offenses has always been included, and now in public schools has expanded to include many diverse behaviors well beyond drugs and weapons, and placed out on the streets, most often to end up in legal trouble and jail. Of schools composed of teachers and administrators who refuse to acknowledge that they've created a punishment system designed to chew up and spit out 99% of us, and only create true success for 1%, a great mass of future lives of misery.
I was thinking of the many ways in which so many citizens care about the plight of non-human animals. Cats where outrage is expressed at their needless killing, and the growth of humane no-kill shelters, along with trap neuter release programs. The endless battle over fighting dog breeds who are no longer bred for fighting, but where communities broadbrush the breed and attempt to outlaw them. The police dogs that if they are killed by citizens, the citizens are guilty of felonies, but citizen's elderly dogs are left on the freeway by the cops only to be run over by a car, but no felony charges are brought against that cop, and many similar incidents. The many activists involved in calling attention to the deteriorating sea conditions for whales, dolphins, sea lions, even dying starfish, but for which the various industrial systems causing the damage are essentially unstoppable.
Has our U.S. system completely mistrained all of us citizens in a fantastic culture? We're supposed to be infinitely kind, infinitely polite, and infinitely generous, while our governmental systems in fact are not. Where our government is instrumental in supplying weapons, literal or metaphorical, to anyone who can wreak endless havoc in others' lives. Where, those people, over there, are in need of killing in anyway possible, either slow deaths which take a lifetime, or quick deaths caused by bombs.
Go ahead, kill those Palestinian children, as many as you can, so their brothers and sisters who escape such can grow up with the hope they may one day extract vengeance on their enemies, all so we can have a weapons cache in the Middle East, and will continue to need such in perpetuity.
Perhaps our laws are all screwed up. Is a quick death while we're kids preferable to the lives we have? Is that what our government is telling us? Instead of expelling students, should we just have firing squads, so that those kids who made a single, minor mistake in a system designed to create failure are quickly put of their misery, instead of forced to live under a system of a lifetime of minimum-wage cruelty from which they otherwise shall never escape? Should we enable anyone to slay cats or dogs running loose around neighborhoods, simply because there are too many? Perhaps all male children should simply be aborted, or slain on their day of birth, because by god, it's a rape culture, and if there aren't any men, there will no longer be such a culture?
Are the Israelis telling us the truth about human existence and our individual lives of endless toil and heartbreak? Are their actions of killing their enemies children, in fact, a kinder way of dealing with a severely flawed human existence?
