Out in the Serengeti and Ngorogoro Crater I often found myself thinking about how horrible animals are. Take lions, for example. Only one male per pride, often because the more dominant male either killed the other (who might have been his brother), or kicked him out to wander on his own and fend for himself. Or the buffalo. We saw one old male buffalo wandering off from a herd all by himself. “Why is he alone?” we asked our driver. “He probably got kicked out,” was the response we received.
All I could think to myself was, “This is absolutely awful! Kicking family members out so that one can be in charge. Getting rid of each other when one gets old.” And then came the realization: humans are just as atrocious in their behavior toward each other.
Wildebeests kill each other over territory. Humans kill each other to gain access to land. And the old buffalo who was kicked out of his herd? We do that, too. What do we do with the elderly in our society? We throw them into homes to die so we don’t have to deal with them. We don’t visit them to seek their years of wisdom because, to our society, we don’t value them anymore, or we see them as “demented,” or we say that they are “too old to understand.” Who is too old to understand triumph, failure, or love? And I am not blindly accusing society; I am part of this society too, and I know the prejudices that lay deep within me no matter what I do to make them go away.
So, we, with our ethics and morals and society and laws, are just as animalistic (hence inhumane) as “those wild animals” who shun and kill each other. But we, we do it in the name of religion, freedom, expansion, democracy, and those developments are in no way animalistic.
(Tone: Tounge in cheek)
No comments:
Post a Comment