Posted on October 13, 2009 - by Rasham
HUMANITY EXTINCT
I heard the news today and tears filled my eyes: an animal in a man’s world has almost no room to survive. What has happened to us that we see an animal as a commodity, that we respond to them without sympathy or emotion? What has happened to us, where the basic needs of a living creature become our heaviest burden, where we see an animal and see not life and love, but death and affordances? What has happened to us, when we are capable of massacre, of slaughter, of inflicting pain and disease and torture and neglect? To clip the ears of a puppy with the sharpest tool from our belt, to bind the legs of a newborn calf, to remove organs from the throat of a living beast, to knife the skin from a dog’s back as he whimpers and whines: oh yes, these are the guilty deeds of the men and women who walk amongst us, whether they bear the blade in their back pocket or unintentionally turn to look the other way. What has happened to us?
And for some these truths are too uncomfortable; they simmer in the back-lot of the mind and before they are able to guide sprouting thoughts to a probable solution something else wins the attention of the eye and all potential for consideration is snuffed.
But for most these truths come as an overwhelming antonym to the sugarcoated illusions we are so mercilessly fed. We know so little of the origins of the contents of our lives, assuming that because we pay fair price, there is little need for concern. Why should we challenge those who produce the source of our livelihoods? We are taught that harm comes to those who are ill-deserving: when we live decently and minimally, we assume that the fruits of our efforts are and can be trusted. We don’t question the reality within which we live because in it we are comfortable, complacent, settled, surviving to the best of our knowledge and wanting nothing beyond what is within the immediacy of our grasp.
But we are being harmed in the most disturbing of ways, back-stabbed by our fellows and misguided by those whom we have elected to lead. We eat what is sold, we drink what is poured, we buy what is discounted and rarely do we hesitate, do we meditate on the possibility that things aren’t as ritually pure as they seem. 
What is the benefit of such a world? I doubt it is the literal manifestation of an entrepreneur’s ideals, but with the origins of our nation there are the perpetuated frequencies of cruelty and unnecessary slaughter: history provides the view that from the initial patriotic practices of a developing nation our fathers perfected the art of heartlessness and cruelty: we are merely surviving the tradition as manifest destiny is still very much alive between the synthetic threads of our liberal quilt. It is a popular sport to believe in the personal pursuit of riches, power, and fame: an even more popular sport is to believe in the pursuit of these ends at any cost, no matter the lives wasted, the earth spoiled, the people sickened, the masses poisoned, the youths stunted, the animals rotted, the oceans scoured, the hearts hardened. We have been searching and striving and growing and expanding for so many years and now we stand as a crowd of defective and debilitated people with the bloody flesh of our earth companions rotting between the soured crevices of our cavernous teeth: what now? 
If it were possible that every human being alive within the borders of our country could witness the gross processes which fund our modern existence I think, I hope that every individual would weep at the disturbing loss of humanity, and would praise the liberating revelation as the source of all illness, disease, plague and misery becomes vividly apparent.
There are choices you can make and I hope you do. There are some who would rather soak in the shallow waters of commercialism, who could and would wield a wand and commit all of earth’s children to burn in the fiery eruption of the devil’s orgasm. I hope that we all do not become what every mainstream horror flick portends: infected and enraged beasts that pillage and plunder in search of just one more taste of blood. Then again, isn’t that what we have always been? Happy Columbus Day, Columbus without whom we wouldn’t have corn, the root of all that sustains us.