A local bakery was closed last week because someone complained about seeing cockroaches there, and that set me thinking.
People say cockroaches are filthy and spread diseases, and then, without pause for thought, they fumigate frenziedly. They condemn pigeons as rats of the air and rave that they should be exterminated. Folks shoot pheasants and partridges to death just because they are flying and to claim that they can shoot, and beautiful harmless deer just because they are there. Others kill furry animals because they think they will look better in their skins than the animals did, or bigger beasts just to stick their heads on the wall for them to posture proudly in front of them for the social kudos accorded by idiots.
Now, while I must admit I never welcome mosquitos whining around my ears in the dark, that is a personal matter between them and me. However, I do think that the generalized reaction against the rest of our fellow-inhabitants of this our only planet home is going a bit far.
For instance, you don't catch colds or pneumonia from cockroaches, or leprosy or smallpox from birds - nor even 'flu until the recent hysterical panic about the few isolated transfers of bird-flu. You don't contract cancer from flies, do you? What newt ever drove anyone to madness or suicide? Name me the pig or frog that led your daughter to prostitution or your son to violent crime. What did any elephant ever do to you that you should want his eye-teeth for your billiard balls or piano keys?
You don't catch myxomatosis from rabbits, do you, though the bunnies have every reason to complain about the humans infecting them, just as every bug and microbe can rightfully feel aggrieved about being pesticided off the planet just for breathing.
Mice and rats are not responsible for the thousands slaughtered annually on our roads in the interest of our buying and burning the gas we are also now obliged to war over. Neither fox nor gazelle makes and sells arms for others to use on strategic orders to murder others by the million. The list goes on . . .
Just for once, think about this. When you kill a living being of any kind you are irrevocably cutting and obliterating forevermore a life-line that previously extended back unbroken for three thousand million years. And you just try reconstituting the wreckage of what you killed. You can't. Ever.
When you think about it, the human is not the best thing that ever happened to the planet, is it? Hell, some elements of the human race even prey on the rest of its own kind, selling them every kind of harmful thing or substance in excess just for the sake of receiving the fiction of money - or fundamentally even for the malicious spite they bear us.
No, so far as the planet is concerned, the human is definitely not a very good idea. For the sake of garnering ever more of the same fictional loot, some even deliberately and systematically - for religious reasons, they say, sure - have all the other idiot humans working themselves into the ground for them on a global scale, and the excess energy involved in all the unnecessary work is overheating our entire sole and only planet, but, with their carefully deadened mentalities, much anyone cares, for all they ever do about stopping it. Between you and me, I think that most of the human race went quietly mad five thousand years ago with the invention of money.
Humans should learn to respect the planet and its other inhabitants. Therefore I suggest it would be a good idea if the humans demonstrated good faith and started by respecting other humans. To this end it has to be made a punishable offense to sell others prejudicial things such as tobacco, drugs and weapons and, worst of all, to inflict on them the perverting delusion of the value of cash, which then spawns and fosters all the other vices and aberrations.
The all-too-evident criminal distortion of all our administrations via the corruption of all our leaders has to be recognized and punished as the crime it really is. Specifically, it has to be made a capital offense to bribe and blackmail our leaders to submit the rest of us to the merciless hands of the financiers so that we all - as we do - have to overwork for them and thus damage the planet and all its other inhabitants.
Er - but doesn't that mean that we have to start with the Rothschilds and work downwards via the Bilderbergers and all our 'presidents', 'kings', corrupt political systems and distorting toady media?
Yes, that's right, it does.
Then start and let's get working.