On Pets and Children

All parents may not be bad people, but all parenting is bad. Parenting children is not only over-rated - the influence we have as adults over growing children may, optimistically, be confined to the span of the first five years and no more. This means that afterwards, as the child grows to have enough sense and sensibility to discern - viscerally - good from bad, right from wrong, truths from obfuscations, only coercion and psychological warfare must be inflicted. Every child will discern vividly this: and so the long years we keep children like property with their elders like owners means parenting is limited to the same obligations as your average prison guard.

However horrifying you might find comparing the average prison guard to a parent, it does make parenting a fitting complement to the function of our public schools, to begin there, all of our other public institutions, and our private institutions by definition. Compliance is really all we reward.

As matured adults we are supposed to defer to Power, kneel before it, parrot its rhetoric for good grades, secured employment, and in defense of our doctoral theses: this is first taught in the Home where children are house-broken, and then reinforced in the schools, and later exemplified in our workplaces.

The consequences for disobedience are well known by everyone but best expressed by the worst offenders and so-called delinquents, while the more educated and disciplined make apologies and keep their heads down.

The lessons we impose on small children seem to come from all sides, public and private, to mold otherwise natural human beings into very unnatural ones so they can - we keep telling ourselves - succeed. It takes a lot of training and myopia to not examine what success means in our civilization, what it implies against our actual and moral land-fills, and what it makes of the human being.

Those who cannot be house-broken as children will be treated to Resource Specialists, Child Psychologists, the cottage industry of New Methods. If that doesn't take, the child can be given all sorts of medications down their throats. And worst-case finality is our vast and expanding penal system.

So our childhoods can potentially be fairly loathsome experiences at the hands of these prison guardians, and this is troubling enough when it is children who are the ones being restrained, coerced, beaten, extorted, and alienated from their Natural development. But now at younger and younger ages - as the machines have not only made slaves of their parents but now exotic ones are put in the hands of the youngest - they are plunged deeper and earlier into the obscene market culture of high technology: better to start them early at being slaves to machines as being consumers and wage-slaves who follow orders.

Our domestic pets at least are spared being made into the consumers and slaves to machines: their owners and masters alone are still being targeted to buy the most exotic of pet foods and refuse to litter house and yard. But otherwise, the way we've come to treat these nonhuman beings is another atrocity on Nature at hands worse than the prison guard but closer to the guard at the Death Camp.

Neither your dog or cat or gold fish being affected by social policy or at risk of going extinct can say anything back to us on their behalf. And our inability to hear them - distinct from them saying something - or to see what is really going on with them and the Natural World is in direct proportion to how even our fluency with languages has evaporated: we do not care about trees in forests, be they felled or clear-cutted. We do not care what cows are made to eat as long as our cuts of beef are cheap. Language is a subtle thing and not restricted to words. An illustration of how facile we've become is the Good Witch Glenda's response to Dorothy in the "Wizard of Oz:" I didn't tell you, because you didn't ask.

Nature, when all is said and done, will not forgive us for our delusions and ignorance. Nature will do what it is doing and wipe us out.

Most of us have sense enough to know a gold fish should not be put in a hot [or cold] pot of coffee, yet it is still to this hour perfectly acceptable to make the home of the same gold fish a small bowl of water placed in the center of your coffee table. This is also supposed to be charming. It is also acceptable and highly marketable to house dolphins and whales in small tanks of water for our amusement. This is supposed to be entertaining.

None of these is the natural habitat for a gold fish or a whale, but our civilization and its dissonance dress this up with apologia upon absurdity that would make a Southern slave owner proud.

Meanwhile, a delicate ecosystem of natural habitats is being assaulted.

On the other hand, we house children ... well, anywhere. The political class, where they are marginally important, come out to kiss them to win votes, and pass Christian, Judaic, or Sharia laws against Human Nature on the child's behalf, as if the child cares: the average ones of us form a willing chorus to these prattling sermons.

But yet, children are housed in all sorts of deplorable places, from shanties with no clean water and old diseases like polio and the plague at the back door, to cold, over-extended stucco houses in the middle of deserts, which teach the child nothing about his or her relation to the natural world but only make being a parasite on Nature normal and to be aspired when the child becomes an adult and wants a large, over-extended stucco house of their own.

Similarly with our coercion, displacement, oppression, castigation, corporal and capital punishments, cajoling of children - all dressed up in civilized terms - just so, deliberately, they can grow into obedient, undeveloped cogs, afraid to raise their voices at their master-managers.

Our pets have had it worse, since the supposedly fortunate ones are made to live right along side us, like collaborators. And every rebelliousness is treated as a delinquency: they too must be house-broken.

The only freedom for them is escape: adulthood for the pet yields no more rights and liberties than when they were pups or kittens or whatnot. They gain no more rights or privileges, and are often referred to by adults as "our baby." Many are dressed in odd bits of clothing, which I can't bear to look at.

For our pets, our modern society has become an inhospitable place given the rapacious destruction of the Natural World on the one hand, and the confines of our ever-shrinking apartments, narrowing acreage of our "lots," and abundant opportunities to become road-kill on the other. Escape from the tyranny of the owner in our urban and suburban never-never land is filled with hazard upon hazard and certain premature death.

(Of course, this is the exact same consequence to our adult children if they themselves attempt an "escape" from the wage-slave system as cogs: misery and certain premature death.)

But this is if you are lucky to find an apartment owner or rental that allows pets!

We are told again and again that we have an excess of cats and dogs, that our shelters are filling up with unwanted pets to be rescued, to be adopted, or to be euthanized. It is common and accepted practice to "fix" - meaning, sterilize - the new pets, and this is just as uncontroversial and unexamined as the West's common practice to sterilize the women of the global South. One wonders if the Humane Society got the idea from Planned Parenthood, an early advocate of sterilizing Black women.

Just as we have less room for Nature we have less room for these nonhuman beings, and so we deal with them in the most efficient NAZI fashion. Our housing is increasingly unfriendly to other parts of the ecosystem, including and especially pets, so it is no wonder an excess has been created. And no wonder a NAZI culture like ours - bent on death and destruction for profits - would easily turn to "putting down" the unwanted breeds, like they were rodents or cockroaches - also necessary to a real ecosystem.

In this maybe these nonhuman beings have it a bit better than the prospects of the slave system that awaits the rising generations of human beings: the pets meet a quick end at the end of the veterinarian needle, while the child grows to have to deal with the failed state, and to one extent or another make a peace with the failed state if he or she doesn't want to go crazy: the adult child must become an accomplice. Worse, the adult child is coerced into helping to build the walls of his work camp if he or she wants to eat.

The pet is only expected not to bite, not to ruin the furniture, and to take care of its natural functions outside or in a plastic box.

What to do? How to do it? Zoos, aquariums, and humane kennels should remind us that even Chancellor Hitler allowed the Red Cross into a selected Death Camp to showcase that all is well, when all was not. Our gullibility knows no depths of stupidity and cruelty. Our excesses, our gathering mental and actual debris, and the intricate philosophies we invent to support them must be cast on a funeral pyre: I can't think of anything more humane as that.

Reforms will not be enough if the ecosystem of humans, nonhumans, and other life is to not only flourish but also develop positively.

Our paradigm of creating little jails for ourselves in little work camps encircled in little prisons leaves room for very little and risks only making more things into expendables, like our pets and other nonhuman beings, to be exterminated judicially or extra-judicially. To continue on this path will only bring more "humane" solutions not unlike the Final Solution as we serve the high purpose of the market force and not the Life Force.