I am not an animal person. I have never really had a pet, and never really wanted one. Zoos are fine as long as I don't have to pay. I have noticed, however, that animals in the zoo really behave nothing like their counterparts in the wild. They are fed, bathed, and provided for in just about every way possible. It seems like the perfect life, but is it? I remembered when they tried to free "Willy", the famous whale from the movies, back into the ocean. Despite their best efforts to get him ready for the wild, "Willy" died within a year. He just couldn't survive on his own. He couldn't feed himself, interact with rest of the wild whales and seemed to have lost all motivation to live.
What's the point? Zoos and cages, while they provide almost everything an animal could ask for, also rob them of their most important attribute- the ability to survive on their own. With "Willy" the trainers actually tried several times to release the whale, but it kept coming back hungry and lethargic, unable to fend for itself. And so they took care of it and tried again until it died. Is that so different from what is happening between us and our government today?
We used to be a people with impenetrable will, capable of overcoming and surviving any challenge that came our way. Heck, we defeated the world's greatest empire (at the time), just so we could taste liberty. If any people knew how to survive in the wild, it was the us, the Americans. But look at us now. We are facing serious challenges, sure, but what are our solutions? Beg the government to bail us out? Are you serious? I wonder if we aren't just walking into a cage. And what's worse, I don't think we even realize what we are going to have to give up in the process.
It seems to be one sad cycle. Even conservatives said that the first federal bailout was our only option. But why? Why had we gotten ourselves into that position in the first place? Are we not capable of surviving on our own? Maybe we have already been in a cage longer than we thought. It maddens me that liberals constantly deny the tremendous price that must be paid to simply turn our problems over to the government for them to "solve". That price is liberty. Oh and by the way, their solutions are awful.
Occasionally you hear of animals successfully being reintroduced into the wild. It is a difficult and risky process, but in the end the animal is going to find a much more fulfilling life in the wild. It's hard, no doubt. There are casualties, sure. But I don't think anything can adequately replace the satisfaction that accompanies one who has learned how to survive on their own, and that seems to hold true anywhere in the animal kingdom.
So the question is, when are we going to break the cycle? When are we going to make the difficult choice to reject the zoo that is our government and trust ourselves instead? When are we going to embrace the ideal that life in a cage is really no life at all?
What do you think?
1 comment:
As the government provides more and more, the people provide themselves less and less. The country has been slowly slipping into that scenario for decades. That was not what the founding fathers intended, and definitely not what has made this country great.
On the bailouts, it is a curious thing that caused all of the problems. Here is a very good article sent to me by a friend: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/diamond-and-kashyap-on-the-recent-financial-upheavals/. Basically, the bailout was necessary to make sure our banking system remained mostly intact, although recent developments have called into question it's necessity. Regardless, the root of the problem lies in the poisonous ideas you've described.
"Affordable housing" has gone from meaning cheap apartments to being the government handing money to people who want houses they can't afford. It's an effort to provide everyone with a cage, and it sounds like a bunch of the animals want inside.
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