A new generation is growing up in our midst, a generation actuated by new ideas and new principles. It is serious and enthusiastic for these new ideas and its enthusiasm, even when it is misdirected, is, I believe, in the main sincere. But we are living in a skeptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humor which belonged to an older day.
I was thinking about what diamond to mine from The Dead and debating between the power of love and the ability of the past to strangle the present when an abandoned puppy walked right up to me, whined, and then found herself snuggled in my arms. This puppy was abandoned sometime early this weekend with no collar and I will update as to the status of a microchip though I'm willing to be there isn't one. After class, this puppy goes to
Heart of the Valley. Let me first be upfront and honest about my near blinding rage. It's best to vent and get that out of the way.
Under no circumstance should pets ever exist as accessories (even though that's exactly the system we have) or be taken in by people who think puppies and kittens are “cute” only to find themselves incapable of achieving the level of responsibility that puppies and kittens require. Puppies and kittens and babies of all species require a level of responsibility that greatly exceeds what the average idiot anticipates. When that level of responsibility is not reached, inevitably neglect sets in. Neglect is abuse and abuse is illegal. When an idiot who takes in a puppy or kitten learns they cannot adequately provide the care needed, that idiot should take the puppy or kitten to the animal shelter. Even though their failed care is wrong, surrendering the animal to the shelter is the correct thing to do when it's a no kill shelter. Heart of the Valley only euthanizes feral cats which they deem unadoptable. That's a separate blog post. This is the second time I've found a pet (1 kitten and now 1 puppy) on campus outside of the sub. People dump pets in highly populated areas thinking that someone else will take the pet. No, these pets were not “lost”. No one claimed either of them after I contacted the campus police, KGLT, put up fliers etc. If I ever catch someone dumping a pet, I will more likely than not execute some vigilante justice on the spot. I lay better than 50/50 odds on this. Here in Montana, it takes no effort at all to round up a truck with an ATV, big garbage bags, a shovel and a working gun.
End rant.
So, naturally, there should be a follow up addressing “why does Mick think this way”. Unnecessary cruelty is wrong it's as simple as that. I have an analogy for this which can further expand upon my view. The traditional out-of-control-train is headed towards a split in the track and a group of people are divided onto both tracks after the split. Some people will take move the train to take out the group containing older people leaving the younger ones more opportunity to live life. Others will aim towards the smaller group enabling the larger group to survive. Still others will go after the group of predominately men or women (either to save them or kill them) and the list of possibilities goes on ad nauseum. But wouldn't it just be plain wrong purposefully to jump the train off the tracks and completely take out both groups of people? The I-hate-all-people argument doesn't fly either. In this instance, not all death is imminent and therefor some death is unnecessary. When something which is not only unnecessary but is also preventable occurs and causes significant suffering, I get furious. A much shorter analogy would be to say that someone sees a building burning with random people trapped inside and then makes no effort to call 911. That's unnecessary cruelty in a nutshell.
Here' are more examples and interesting observations on how my view towards unnecessary suffering applies. I've yelled at screaming parents unloading on a crying child completely unaware of why the yelling is happening in an effort to make them stop. There's a wild and tiny bit insane look in the eyes of a person under blind rage. Maybe that will be me when I catch a companion animal abandoning bastard. I don't know. I do know that that the laws which exist to protect children greatly exceed the laws which exist to protect companion animals. We don't go to the mall and buy a kid. This disconnect between the two creates a giant empty chasm in which it becomes easy for people to ignore common decency and then apply their lost decency to both groups. Most serial killers abuse and kill animals before they move on to doing the exact same thing to people. Notice, in that sentence there is a grammatical separation between people and nonhuman animals which touches on the common misconception that humans aren't animals (even though we are). In an exact parallel, most people who have little patience for companion animals have little patience for regular people in regular situations.
Now to tie this in with James Joyce while anyone who's actually managed to make it this far is probably wondering how the hell I could relate them. Gabriel delivers my selected quotation at a group event. The social atmosphere in which the quote was delivered and where it originally applied I feel also matches the current social atmosphere in which humans relate to each other and also to their companion animals. The new generation, our generation, does have new ideas and new principles. Mainly, they're about communication, socialization, ethics, the environment and money. As for that which is “misdirected”, that's generally how our generations actions are described by previous generations. We are leading social change movements simultaneously for the environment and for animal rights and critical mass is building. While fringe activism involving the words “direct action” are titled as “extreme”, and by Joyce as “misdirected”, is simply a response to something equally “extreme” or “misdirected”. A.L.F. wouldn't break into medical testing labs to free the monkeys that have holes drilled into their skulls just so that the addictive qualities of nicotine can be tested even though we already know that nicotine is addictive. E.L.F. wouldn't destroy machinery which destroys the environment if the machinery wasn't being used. I've never participated in anything like that but how anyone from a previous generation doesn't understand this is simply cause and effect is beyond me. This is especially frustrating because the previous generations already had access to this thinking in their literature! Peter Singer wrote his pivotal book Animal Liberation published in 1973 and Edward Abbey wrote an equally pivotal book The Monkey Wrench Gang published in 1975. If you have not read these books, put them on your must read list. This isn't propaganda designed to convince you; it's a terrific lesson in how absurd it is for a previous generation which applauded these books, even if they didn't agree with them, not to understand why a new generation of people doing that stuff today is following in the footsteps of people who did it 30 years ago.
Discussing the educated and the hypereducated while in my very last class as a college undergraduate is kind of weird. The commonality of college degrees today really does give zero value to my literature degree. Maybe a bank will loan me money to buy a house at some point. But wait, I took on debt just to get that benefit? Oddities aside, I don't believe our education causes us to miss out on “humanity”, “hospitality” and “kindly humor”. In fact, I don't think that a single person in our class would have passed over this puppy and left her to go shivering off into to the late-night freezing cold of Montana in January. I think this is because our academic efforts have instilled in us a certain level critical analysis and we know that abandoned babies die in the cold. Landlord policies be damned, that soon-to-die animal needs to get rescued. I sincerely doubt anyone in the class would've acted differently. I may not understand why I don't sit down in a classroom filled mainly with vegans but I know that I don't sit in a classroom filled with apathy towards cute and helpless puppies. So I think our education lends us a greater disposition towards having “humanity”, “hospitality” and “kindly humor”, and certainly when puppies are in the picture.
These qualities didn't exist in greater quantity in generations of ye olde contrary to the typical romantic view. I think each new generation continues to grasp at ways to understand and exemplify those qualities while simultaneously coming up with new ways to ignore them and overturn them. The same sort of thing is going on with Babe Ruth, which I previously mentioned. There's that funny application of selective memory which makes Babe Ruth better at baseball the more years that pass since he played. I think the same is true with manners. If you go back far enough to public dueling when people could and would kill each other over trivial insults, I doubt people were more polite then. They just had craftier and more subtle ways of being rude. I cite the beginning of Romeo and Juliet and all of it's thumb biting glory. People have always been uncouth and only a good healthy dose of education or experience (not necessarily of the academic type) will bring out the best in us.
Now that I think about it, was Gabriel using irony as means of subtly insulting Ms. Ivors, even though she wasn't present, when he finishes my selected quote with “those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humor which belonged to an older day”? Right before the quote he narrates that Ms. Ivors had “gone away discourteously”.
