Fixing the Problems of Our World
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Since we are all potential thieves, pedophiles, murderers, embezzlers (look inside yourself!), we cannot suppress those expressions in society at large—so we must convert their energy into generosity and love. After all, they are not what they seem; they are scraps of failed consciousness, suppressed graces yet unborn.
In addition, incarceration or execution of innocent suspects is inevitable when the goal is not justice but ritual punishment or ritual murder.
By then they are all the wrong prisoners.
“All prisoners,” chanted Diane di Prima in her 1970 Revolutionary Letters, “are political prisoners: every Indian on a reservation, every junkie shooting up in a john, every pot smoker, the ancient wise turtle at the Detroit Aquarium, our own greedy minds, our own dull senses, our own tense bodies….” That just about says it all.
We see video footage of a group of young black men in a New York State prison yard debating Machiavelli’s versus Rousseau’s views of natural man—high-school dropouts who have also been reading Hegel and Kant in German for homework in their cells. I at least am moved to tears.
Ironically these criminals doing serious crime are taking college courses behind bars because, only after losing their freedom, do they realize what they really wanted to do with their lives in the first place. They are just now being awakened. Of course, society never really showed them when they were children—not really, if you think about the modus and decorum of the average grade-school classroom in America—and who could deny the righteous allure of the street and its simple justice and easy pickin’s.
Almost anyone can be humanized, and the thirst for knowledge and education are our only real tools for rehabilitation—of committed jihadists too. Madrasas are merely the regional equivalent of recruitment of uneducated youth into Crips and Bloods and Aryan Brotherhoods.
With each sentence or execution, we enact our collective fate. The lot of prisoners (including animals) across this planet is a warning. As long as we are not a compassionate or a just species, no one is safe! The mind that is unforgiving, greedy, and implacable, that punishes and kills for its own grim satisfaction, is a mind that can turn against any of us in the blink of an eye. It is our mind.
Kafka got it right: the trial could begin tomorrow, the police arrive this very night. Anyone—anyone!—can be arrested for any crime, real or imaginary, is susceptible to finding himself or herself dependent on others’ mercy. Every moment we live rests on the quotient of compassion in our species, in ourselves.
Those who provide mercy create mercy. Those who spare others propagate forgiveness, for themselves too.
Murdering living creatures on assembly lines is one of the more brutal acts on any planet anywhere. Earth’s slaughterhouses are insults to creation.
When we torture or butcher sentient beings, turn animal bodies into clothes and meat on an industrial scale, we are establishing the baseline of our own sentience and compassion, who we are and how we treat ourselves. We are establishing the fate of all souls under our stewardship. We are declaring the type of universe that we are willing to tolerate and live in. We are sentencing ourselves, almost forever.
This is a profound one, and it will take a very, very long time to work our way through it. Yet we might as well start now because time is a-wastin’ and there is nowhere else to go. We need to learn to feel the pain of harried geese and mice as if our own. We must make it unbearable to harm other creatures gratuitously, even oppressors and stalkers; it must be as if we were hurting ourselves. Empathy is outright essential to our evolution, our very survival. We have to feel, truly feel, the separate, autonomous existence of each creature, as a life relevant and internal to our own as much as “I” itself. We must lance and drain the sociopathic boil in each of us.
Let the ant live, let the duck fly! This does not mean that the peasants should starve. The duck doesn’t even seek this, nor does the ant. Nothing in them bleeds or imparts that message. It means that our inherent consciousness of the unity of sentient beings must transcend the war of nature that is almost as ancient. If we kill for food, then kill with honor and gratitude, as tribes-people across the planet throughout the Stone Ages did implicitly. Eat well, eat heartily, eat them, but do not debase our spirit; do not spawn superfluous voodoo that will feed off you and me and the rest of us for untold future generations.
If we could take even the first steps of intention toward rehabilitation rather than imprisonment, toward respectful and empathic treatment of animals, even ones that we are going to eat, we would alter this planet at its core. The glacier of our being would thaw toward what it must become.
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