So much for Bob...

Sometimes I think I might be wrong about the way I see the world. For anyone who knows me, that should come as a bit of a surprise. After all, my personal hero is "Bucky Katt" from Darby Conley’s comic strip, "Get Fuzzy." In one of my favorite strips, Bucky, Satchel, and their owner, Rob, are eating dinner. After making a short speech about why he refuses to eat mushrooms, Bucky is told by Rob that he’s awfully closed minded, even for a cat. Bucky’s classic response? "I’m not closed-minded. You’re just WRONG."

When I look at the world around me, I’m often horrified at what I find. Cruelty. Injustice. Hatred. Ignorance. Apathy. Magical thinking. And what’s worse, even the most progressive of people that I know don’t see half of the things that horrify me. It’s easy to be outraged about the United States engaging in torture (excuse me, I’ve been informed by an FBI agent at my door just now that force-injecting several liters of saline solution into the veins of ‘terrorists’ doesn’t fall under the definitions of ‘torture’ in the Geneva accords or the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as interpreted by this administration...). It’s easy to be enraged by Phill Kline’s ever-increasingly creepy effort to mine Kansans’ privacy and protect Kansans from the 'terrible influences' of rap music. It’s easy to feel ashamed that Fred Phelps and his clan (or is it Klan?) are Topekans and represent Kansas to people all over the nation... but I always seem to find more to make me numb than do other people.

I flipped through the channels on television this evening after preparing my dinner, and found a story on CNN about halfway through. It wasn’t really a news item, I suppose. There wasn’t any breaking news or national impact to the story, but it was more of a human interest piece. It was about deer hunting. A newsman was interviewing a young 11-year old girl about her first hunting experience. She had ‘bagged’ a deer, was telling the newsman about how she’d waited with her father in a treestand, what kinds of bullets she’d used to kill the deer, and how she had affectionately named her deer Bob.

I wonder how many other people watching that story on CNN reacted like I did? I felt physically ill. Looking down at my dinner (some homemade bread, vegetables, and a leftover Christmas cookie my mother had baked), I found that I just couldn’t eat any of it, and pushed the plate away. It was difficult to bring myself to look back at the television. The image an adorable little girl smiling and laughing next to the carcass of a non-human animal who had suffered greatly before death, pierced by bullets, bleeding profusely, and most likely in a nightmare of unimaginable terror and confusion... Can there be a more awful disjunction of images? One side of the screen was a reaffirmation of the value of living beings and why life is worthwhile, and the other side a paean to suffering, bloodshed, and misery. Physical revulsion doesn’t half cover how I felt. I was about to throw out my dinner when I realized that if I didn't eat the food, I'd get hungry later and would eat more food. Knowing that there are people all over the world, including some in my own city, that starve to death each year, I couldn't bring myself to toss it in the trash. I forced myself to eat my dinner.

Other people don’t seem to have these reactions. Hunting, fishing, testing cosmetics on rabbits, bull-fighting, dog-fighting, cock-fighting, factory farming, using the magnifying glass to fry ants on the sidewalk... Isn’t there enough death and cruelty in the world between humans to sate people’s bloodlust? I wonder if there is a way to just close off the part of my mind that wants to gently catch the spider in the bathtub and escort him outside, and instead just squish him like other people do? Would that make me a bad person if I could?