In his wonderful book, A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf by Muir, John [Hardcover] (Google Affiliate Ad) John Muir was talking about arriving in Florida in the early 1900s. He was struck by the great abundance of food and vegetation and wild life of all sorts. The deer just about bumped into him, And the bear. And the alligators. He was also struck by malaria, apparently as was everyone down in those parts in those days. He got typhoid as he was sick with malaria. It slowed his hike for about 3 months.
He had lots of time to think. He mused:
"The world, we are told, was made especially for man - a presumption not supported by facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God's universe, which they can not eat or render in some way useful to themselves. They have precise dogmatic insight of the intentions of the Creator, and it is hardly possible to be guilty of irreverence in speaking of their God any more than of heathen idols. He is regarded as a civilized, law-abiding gentleman in favor either of a republican form of government or of a limited monarchy: believes in the literature and language of England; is a warm supporter of Sunday schools and missionary societies; and is as purely a manufactured article as any puppet of a half penny theater,
With such views of the Creator it is, of course, not surprising that erroneous views should be entertained of the creation. To such properly trimmed people, the sheep, for example, is an easy problem - food and clothing "for us", eating grass and daisies while by divine appointment for this predestined purpose, on perceiving the demand for wool that would be occasioned by the eating of the apple in the Garden of Eden.
In the same pleasant plan, whales are store houses of oil for us, to help out the stars in lighting our dark ways until the discovery of the Pennsylvania oil wells....Cotton is another plain case of clothing. Iron was made for hammers and ploughs, and lead for bullets; all intended for us. And so for other small handfuls of things.
But what if we should ask these profound expositors of God's intentions, How about those man-eating animals -- lions, tigers, alligators -- which smack their lips over raw man? Or about those myriads of noxious insects that destroy labor and drink his blood? Doubtless man was intended for food and drink for all those? Oh, no! Not at all! ...."
He goes on and concludes that he is "glad to leave these ecclesiastical fires and blunders, I joyfully return to the immortal truth and immortal beauty of nature."
I remember when my kids had gone to an Audubon Society summer camp and they came home singing wonderful camp songs and playing "Prey and Predator". "I'll be the cute little bunny rabbit and you be the mean old fox." "No! I'll be the smart snake and you be the little mouse going home to its mother." So, yes, they did fight and argue about who got to be whom.
This afternoon after listening to the great revolutionary poet Ernesto Cardinal read his poems in the ruins of an old convent decorated with pre-Columbian stone sculptures, I was talking with an older (sic) woman who is here in Nica in the Peace Corps. She happened to mention that Peace Corps volunteers can get kicked out of the Peace Corps if they visit Guatemala or Honduras while working here. Wow! The US backed monster who was President of Guatemala has now been accused of crimes against humanity..230,000 dead Mayans would qualify almost anyone. So far every time a witness is called, they have been assassinated. Peace Corps seems a little ironic. Same but different story in Honduras. Check it out.
It felt today that there is a little leap that has happened since the musings of John Muir. The leap is from the view that everything on the planet was created for the use of man except for those pesky mosquitoes which should be eliminated, to the modern version that replaces 'man' in general with the USA. If we can't exploit it for the glory of our lives, we should consider it evil and eliminate it.
One day old man karma is going to bite us.
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