The crux of the human condition

Killing our young…

Hmm. Funny feeling that. First you can’t type – the Carpal Tunnel surgery saw to it. Then you just don’t feel like it – although your brain is teeming with a million ideas and opinions. Does it matter to anyone else what you think or care about? You wonder whether it’s just you that gets worked up about so many issues. Like the young Xhosa initiates dying in numbers yet again because they’re dragooned into illegal, incompetent and unsanitary circumcision schools. The outcome: devastated parents, young men dead or in intensive care in public hospitals, in many cases losing part or all of their penises in desperate surgical interventions to save their lives. Septicaemia, pain, humiliation and ruined prospects. Unsterilised 'instruments' and the HIV-transmission implications don't even bear thinking about. And yet this was December 2005 - in South Africa - yet again. It's become a twice-a-year slaughter.

All cultures need to at some stage let go of aspects of their traditions in order to join the march into civilisation, enlightenment, modernity, the future – call it what you will. For what must be the very first time, the South African legal authorities have charged some of the initiation school ‘leaders’ with murder. Now let’s go one step further and actually see some of them get prison life sentences – and this annual carnage, wreaked on young men desperate to march the Xhosa rite of passage into manhood, will stop.

It’s for the birds…

Is it just me who watches the geese, ducks and chickens that have been the pets or food supply of Asian or Turkish people, getting stuffed, live into garbage bags – in their thousands? Does avian flu and the possibility of the virus (almost inevitably) performing a species-hopping mutation, absolve us of the obligation to euthanase with compassion? Or is being carried upside down, by your neck or bunched together like grapes and being stuffed into bags in which you will be have limbs broken and your body crushed by the weight of those that follow you even before you do suffocate, simply the price of a ‘human’ being having dominion over you? What do these things say about us?

My overwhelming ‘take’ on 2005 and the beginning of 2006 (already!) is that although we may be (so we think) at our most technologically advanced as a species, we’re in very poor shape from a spiritual, compassion, dignity, selflessness and ‘human’ perspective. I wonder if in fact, we’re not plumbing an all-time ‘low’? A sad thought.

Comments

[Rich...!]

My fav songwriter of all time, Rodrigo Alfaro of Satanic Surfers (it's just a name) agrees with you:

"We don't have to feel it
The pain behind what we are served, just food on a plate, a disintegrated creature

(How much do we know)
About what we eat and where it comes from?
We know we are superior
But we sure as hell don't act responsible, no, instead we inseminate, force feed and cage them

And we call ourselves civilized
(Call ourselves human)
Yeah, we're so fucking civilized when we act like savages and speak of a higher morality

We wash the blood from our hands as we
Institutionalize murder
We wash the blood from our
We wash the blood from our hands

Will the cloning of animals bring us to a new dimension of cruelty, a step further on the scale of efficiency of production?

I mean we already inseminate, force feed and cage them

Yeah, we're so fucking civilized"

It's a great song, even though I do institutionalise murder daily...!