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Thursday, February 24, 2005
Lions, Tigers, Elephants, Rhinos, Gorillas, etc.
How often does some Discovery Channel-type labor to make us guilty about extinction of dangerous species in Africa and Asia? You know the shows I mean. A rich voice sorrowfully intones, "Surely a way must be found by which man and beast may co-exist on this planet because when the great beasts have all died, this will be a poorer world by their absence."
About then I always tell myself that those selfish Africans and Asians ought to show a little more flexibility, allowing elephants occasionally to rampage through their useless little farms, allowing tigers to eat a few huts full of overpopulation... You shudder. Right, but you, too, have felt the same way without, possibly, enunciating those thoughts so explicitly. My feelings always run toward exotic endangered animals and against little, scrawny, third-world, way-too-many-of-them-anyway people.
Now, upon reflection, my hypocrisy is apparent to me. I'm wrong.
What has turned me around re. this issue? Answer: the yellow brick apartment residents. They are the local rampagers and eaters of huts full of populace, so to speak. They are the exotic specimens of 38th Street. And I want them locked up.
A Discovery Channel special about yellow apartment dwellers might go like this...
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They live crowded into shabby, filthy little yellow brick dens on 38th Street, bitterly controversial. Neighbors want these apartments torn down and their inmates sent to jail or, maybe, to Mars. Does this issue allow room for compromise? Tonight Discovery Channel investigates....GOONS ON 38TH STREET.
All they want is the right to prey on those not like themselves. They simply and naturally need to feed off other life forms in their territory. How? Why, they must receive housing, medical care, education for their children, food, transportation and entertainment without working and paying for these things themselves...because that's the way they are. Unless others do all the paying as they do all the playing, they may cease to exist. The closest approach they make to traditional work is to participate at a bottom-feeder level in the drug trade, selling about enough to finance their own needs. These unique and special creatures are not designed with daily jobs in mind. They are predators... some say parasites, bit of a taxonomy issue there.
Surely a big world affords room for them, too. What is the point of blaming a subspecies for being what it is? Haven't we learned enough about ecology to realize that each life form has an important place in maintaining life as we know it? The fact that we can not see the value of a life form simply means that we have not done adequate research. Better science someday will lead to explanations unavailable to us now.
They feel themselves entitled to noisily rampage at will. What does this look like when happening? It looks like nightly noise fests/fights such that working people around them have no opportunity to sleep. It looks like random strewing of trash that blows all over this area to be picked up by people who had nothing to do with introducing it into the environment. The day does not go by when little old neighbor, Joanna, is not forced to detrash her yard. A few minutes ago she was out in the cold rain setting her trash containers at curbside for pick up. Before coming back indoors she noticed and picked up piles of pop cans, fast food wrappers, etc. She has never in her life thrown onto the ground a pop can or a fast food wrapper. Every day, however, she picks up after the rampaging beasts of 38th Street. She feels very cranky about this daily chore. She feels that the behavior of the 38th Street rampaging beasts is unfair to her. What she fails to understand, though, is that she and they are different, created for divergent purposes. She was born to pick up others' trash and the great beasts were born to introduce an element of excitement into a world otherwise safe but bland. Unwilling to accept this point of view, she wants all the beasts either removed to fenced game parks, or caged in zoos.
Please, those of you not immediately threatened by yellow apartment dwellers and therefore sympathetic to their future, please support Keep Our Streets Safe For Goons, or KOSSFOG. KOSSFOG advocates work tirelessly to shackle police and community efforts to silence forever the inconveniently exotic among us.
After a commercial break we will frankly and fairly address the issue of rogue specimens which kill. Do they exist and if so, what price is paid by allowing them continued free range?
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Legends persist of the occasional rogue 38th Street specimen killimg for entertainment, not for survival. What about old stories of murder, child molestation, domestic violence, drive-by shootings, cruelty to pets?
After reviewing many hours of police footage and tons of court files, our investigators conclude that, yes, residents of the yellow apartments have shed blood and have caused terror, grief and every kind of physical harm. However, what statistics fail to reveal is that most violent confrontations occur between members of the yellow apartment community and have nothing whatever to do with outsiders. Where their behavior impacts a broader population, in each instance, that population invaded yellow apartment territory during the residents' waking hours. An outsider on the sidewalk near the yellow apartments between 2:00 P.M. and 4:00 A.M. finds himself in their little remaining area of control during their time to feed and has therefore brought upon himself whatever the nature of apartment dwellers indicates to them that they should do under these circumstances.
No one, though, has been able to document incidents of violence arising from contact between an outsider and a yellow apartment resident between 4:00 A.M. and 2:00 P.M. During this period, they sleep and are therefore no problem to passersby. KOSSFOG works diligently to make the Kensington area aware of possibility for peaceful co-existence with apartment residents. If only enlightened neighbors could avoid apartment dweller territory during a mere 14 out of the 24 hours/day. With a little understanding, a little flexibility and planning, violent confrontation might all be avoided. Give them their space. Respect their right to be themselves while awake, and stay away. Is that too much to ask?
And ask yourself this question; do you want your children to grow up in a world where the last remaining yellow apartment dwellers have been relocated to fenced and guarded promises? Must children of tomorrow peek at them through the bars or see them only in photos and police videos from a former time? Are these creatures not like the canary in the coal mine, indices of what real freedom is still there for the entire human race? 99.9999% of the human race are passive rule-keepers and as boring as dirt. Let's keep some of the inconvenient, violent, predatory subspecies alive and free, reminding us of the full range of what it means to be human.
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Yeah, well, that's how The Discovery Channel would position this problem, but I say, "Crap, crap, crappity crap on all that nonsense." I have seen the light. I have found solidarity with Asian and African villagers threatened by tigers and lions and elephants and gorillas and rhinos.
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