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Showing posts with label two eyes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label two eyes. Show all posts

Friday, July 8, 2011

She has two eyes...

four limbs, two ears, a nose, a mouth, a body, a covering of skin and one head. She can see, hear, taste, smell, detect heat and cold, feel the wind, feel pain, feel fear and joy. She breathes air, eats food, drinks water and urinates and defecates. She feels hunger, thirst, tiredness, sleepiness and anger. She sleeps each day and will often seek shelter when the weather is not to her liking. She may emit vocalizations in various situations and feeling states. She enjoys gentle caresses and dislikes painful or hurtful touches. She has a mother, a father and maybe brothers and sisters and maybe aunts, uncles and cousins.

Yet, depending on what human animals around her decide, she may be cared for, loved, beaten, skinned alive, forcefully impregnated or she may be ignored. She may be pampered, neglected, esteemed or denigrated. Her life may be such that she does pretty much as she wishes or she may be constrained in gentle or harsh ways. She may be free, partially free, imprisoned, enslaved and/or exploited. She may live to the fullness of her years with many pleasures and delights or her life may be full of terror, misery and ended in suffering and pain after only a fraction of her years are lived...all this through no fault or choice of her own. Some of what may be done to her might be illegal, much of what she experiences at the hands of human animals will be condoned by human law.

Who is she?

I started to stop writing with that question but I usually don't like things that 'hang' like that so I'll go ahead and point out the fact that all of that previously written could be applied to most every sentient being on Earth. Chicken, turtle, cow, human and on and on and on.

"Deoxyribonucleic acid — DNA — is a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms (with the exception of RNA viruses)...The four bases found in DNA are adenine (abbreviated A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T)." (source: Wikipedia)

A critical phrase in the previous paragraph is "all known living organisms". You, me, crabgrass, cockroaches, George Washington...we all share the same four bases for our DNA...the only difference between any of us is the nature of the arrangement.  It was an astonishing moment for me some years ago when I fully comprehended that the physical evidence confirms that all life on this planet is related...that we are all configured by the same stuff...those four bases.

Some of us are configured so similarly that a fairly detailed series of descriptors such as I've presented above doesn't markedly reduce the field of the different shapes, sizes or types of animals that could be being referenced.

The incredible arrogance inherent in human animals deciding that their 'configuration' is the "best" and that all other configurations should be subservient to human animals is mind-boggling and...if fully considered, rather frightening. There is an unhinged quality to such a self-serving judgment.

Sometimes I wonder if the "purpose" of humanity isn't to serve as a warning of how not to be...to all the other 'configurations' of life.

If you don't want to live like a bad example, then begin to live as an ethical vegan