SO for the Fourth of July I went to some friends' house near D.C., mostly because I had an interview down there on the 5th. Yes, I am fully aware that was weeks ago. I'm a lazy bastard. Sue me. My Mojo had been dissipated like fog before the sun. It's back now, though.
So anyway, it was all good, we saw fireworks, blah blah blah. I had some REALLY good ginger beer, though. It wasn't that crap that tastes slightly sweeter than water. THIS shit I tasted all the way down my throat and for about an hour afterward. You know you ate/drank good shit when you burp and you taste it all over again. I call that getting your money's worth. Smoked octopus does that, too. I wish I could remember the brand name of that ginger beer.
The other almost as striking event was an epiphany about my worldview. As the three of us were strolling around town, we saw a fledgling bird on the sidewalk. One of its legs was nonfunctional (probably broken), and it was struggling along in one foot. I'm no ornithologist, but it looked to me that it would have been ready to fly on its own after a week or two.
Now I'm not one to cause or to allow needless suffering. My philosophy has always been to stop it where I could. That's why, in the past, I wouldn't hesitate to stomp on a bat that had been accidentally half-crushed in a window, or smashing the head of a mouse whose back had been broken in a mouse trap. Likewise, my first reaction to this crippled, immature little bird was to goosh it, ending its suffering by hastening what I saw as an inevitable death.
One of my companions, a rat breeder with a heart about as hard as a soggy marshmallow, would have none of it. At her insistence, we put the crippled bird in a hanging plant. We did the same for another apparently uninjured fledging we found. Boy, those damn fledglings were falling from the sky like small flightless birds.
The question is this: I think that most can agree that to allow something to suffer when death is a certainty is wrong, but where's the cut-off point? Would it be alright to kill a wounded animal that had maybe a one in a million chance of survival, or would that one chance be worth taking? What about a one in a hundred chance? What about if your 50 year-old parent stubs his/her toe and said parent hasn't yet squandered all of your inheritance? Maybe I should ask Dr. Kevorkian. I wonder if he'll make house calls. Maybe I'll invite him over to my parent's next birthday party.
Of course, you could say that every life is a long string of suffering until you finally croak in what will probably very painful way. Taxes, illness, old age, stubbed toes, broken bones, boring jobs, acne, heartbreak, hunger, uncomfortable chairs, gas, arthritis, inclement weather, cancer, nasty people, and really bad TV shows are just some of the many things that make our lives hell that someone is likely to encounter.
So why am I still here, you ask? Why haven't I ended my own suffering?
Like I said before, I'm a lazy bastard.
