How am I supposed to respond to it?
No, really. What is it that I can say that hasn’t already been said, that isn’t obvious from the graphic, horrific scenes that I watched over, and over, and over, and over.
Blood on the floor.
Pain in my eyes, in my ears.
And this gnawing feeling that something was dangerously wrong about what I was watching…
No. Not that what I was watching was wrong. I knew it was wrong: that feeling was out in the open, blurring my eyes, making my stomach churn, and my hands shake, and my brain, no, my heart, scream NO at the top of its lungs.
I know what the gnawing feeling was. That something was wrong with HUMANS. With us. I mean, what were we doing in that video?
(I hate that I have to include myself in that term. We. Human. I am human.)
What I hated the most, what made me want to run out of the room, what made my sympathetic nervous system rush away from my control, was the perverse, sickening, EVIL pleasure that I sensed in the background of the scenes that splayed out before me.
They liked it. Those people? Those faceless, nameless, empty shells I was watching destroy lives, were enjoying themselves. It was like… it was like they were raping the idea of humanity. Like being human, or at least, everything we’ve discussed about what it means to be human, was being peeled away, layer by layer, until all that was left was a core. And that core? It wasn’t empathy. It was a rotting, grotesque mass of hate, soft, pulpy, and ripe, like fruit after a few days in the compost heap.
How I saw our core.
http://www.daleysfruit.com.au/forum/i/188/compost-flys.jpg
But I sat it out. I didn’t run away. I didn’t scream. I didn’t even cry, not really.
When I left World Lit on Thursday, I remember feeling detached. I walked to my next class and I sat in the back and I was a good kid and said all the right things at the right time and wrote an essay and oh my goodness, wasn’t I just SPLENDID, the way I could function so normally employing absolutely no part of my inner self.
Well. That lasted about an hour. Until it was time to eat.
Nothing was safe. The cheese on the pizza? Made from the milk of abused cows. The neatly sliced salami? Harnessed from slit throats and hanging bodies, from animals deprived of sunlight and love.
After "Earthlings" this pizza was thoroughly unappetizing.
http://www.watchmojo.com/blogs/images/pizza.jpg
And, of course, my mother calling. On the phone.
On Thursday my uncle died.
Did you know that I cried? A lot.
I don’t cry. Ever. I bite my lip, and I blink, and I breathe deeply, but I don’t cry.
And yet there I was, sliding down the wall in the Andrews hallway, tears streaming down my face while my heart lay bare and bleeding in front of me.
And in that instant, my faith in humanity was restored.
There is no way to justify what "Earthling" portrays. In fact, honestly, I don’t think justification should be attempted: the images speak for themselves. But I also don’t think that the view of humanity that Earthlings brought to mind for me is correct. The core of humanity is not hate. The core of humanity is love. If we could just figure out how to employ our core in every situation…
I know that at the core of humanity is love because I loved my uncle, and when I found out he died, I felt my core shift, and cramp, and painfully rearrange itself to incorporate the news. And I think that if those nameless, faceless figures abusing the animals in "Earthlings" had just taken the time to employ their cores of love, they might not have been so callous in their practices. Maybe, after euthanizing that dog, they wouldn’t have thrown it in the growing pile of dead animals like a sack of potatoes. Maybe they’d have buried it with respect. Or maybe they wouldn’t have euthanized it at all. Maybe they’d have fallen in love, and taken it home, and grown old with it.
Maybe, instead of just looking human, they’d have acted human.
I wish they had.
No comments:
Post a Comment