Numbing The Pain

I love animals.

I think all of them have souls, and what we've done is awful. 

What we've done to chickens and cows and pigs...I wish we didn't. I wish were better carnivores. Eat only when we should. Not this crazy excess of food. 

Is it capitalism? Is that what it all boils down to? Greed? 

They want money so they sell a product (animals) and the masses don't know how to stop eating so we eat our way to death but who cares cuz there's more people born every day so more customers. 

Then there are the beautiful ones...

The lions,the tigers,the jaguars. I see them as giant cats, but cats the same. To hunt them the way we do....to justify killing by paying money....again, that's greed, isn't it? A system created by money...which is basically worthless to everything but humans. I'm sure the leopard that got shot would rather be alive than be traded in for colored paper with numbers on it. 

The ones that hurt the most, to me, are elephants. 

God, just writing this makes me start crying. There's something holy about them. I don't believe in a God but if there was one, I would think elephants came from that place of heaven. They're extraordinary creatures, you know. They remember shit from years ago. They take care of their young, their old, even grieve their dead. They're kind and considerate.  I don't know, to me, they're just amazing. Just fucking amazing and we kill them for their tusks. Two white bones sticking out of their faces that's 5% of them. They kill the elephant with bullets. Not just one, because it is an amazing beast, no, they kill it with dozens and dozens of bullets. And the mothers? They die worried and scared for their babies. They get their faces cut and after the men leave, the scared baby elephant goes to its mother and nudges her. Crying for her to wake up and comfort it. And that's not going to happen, little guy, because she's dead because humans suck. He's going to wander by himself for days, vulnerable and dehydrated not only from the effort but from the tears. They cry for days, you know. It's something that breaks their heart, so that when they do get rescued, they still die from failure to thrive. They want their mothers and no amount of comfort will get them to stop grieving. They die from a broken heart. 

The pain of this hurts me. Actually, it's more than that, it's unbearable kind of agony. I'm a natural empath and seeing something in pain hurts me equally. I feel like my soul is getting sliced into thin little pieces with a cheese slicer. 

All this feeling and earnestness for a better world that will never come to pass is too much for me. So of course, I run to the apathy of postmodernism for comfort. It hurts too much to be this exposed and to be this empathetic. It's easier to take a macro-view of reality and realize just how meaningless existence is. 

I mean, we're on our way, aren't we? Look around. We're killing each other with guns. We live lives doing busy work. Corporations are greedy, so bye-bye forests. We're arrogant so we treat animals terribly. There's so many humans already but men in power want control over women's uteruses so they can create MORE humans. That's another topic but let's just conclude that there's too many humans right now (7.6 billion!) for the resources we have. 

There have been 5 times the Earth has experienced mass extinction. 

1. Ordovician- 86% of life on Earth died. 

2. Late Devonian- 75% of life on Earth died

3. Permian- 96% of life on Earth died

4. Triassic- the grandfather species of what would later make dinosaurs died.  

5. Cretaceous-for around 135 million...yes, MILLION years, dinosaurs existed and then they went bye-bye cuz of an asteroid/climate change.

We're living during the Holocene era. Plants and animals are dying faster than normal. And there's only one thing to blame...HUMANS. Us. We're creating our own massive extinction event. They say it's happening 10-100x faster than usual. We're overachievers even in our own destruction. 

I think this all started with machines. We started to think of convenience as a human right and the easy access to everything and anything we wanted made us think we were the most powerful creatures of all. If we removed electricity and guns from the equation, we'd be back to where we were before the 1850s. It's been less than 200 years since the Industrial Revolution and we've managed to jump into progress with our machines but not progress in our minds or hearts. We're still animals, humans, I mean. Selfish, greedy, ego-centric, stupid humans who now have technology that most people couldn't explain how it works (There's a better way to phrase this but I don't have the time to edit). 

So basically, we are fucked. We are sooooo fucked. We are the only planet with living things in this part of the solar system and we have no respect for our home and so we're all going to die. Earth will be this spinning blue planet with no humans in it in a few thousand years. We didn't need millions of years, just thousands. 

There's no fixing it, either. You can't turn this car around. There's too much damage done already. Ozone's effed. We reached a point of no return a few years ago. Then, there's all that plastic all over the oceans. There are literal continents of garbage floating around the Pacific and Indian Ocean. Course there's the melting glaciers, lots of floods lately. Not enough drinking water. 

Maybe there's some comfort in knowing a human life is so short. I won't be alive to see the complete destruction of this beautiful world. I'd say it's 45% damaged at this point. I'd guess it'll be at 55% by the time I die. 

I've stopped crying over the elephants. Now, I'm laughing and crying. 

It's so tragic that it's funny, don't you think?