The Wildlife Society

The elephant’s trunk blows, and that trumpet rolls waves over its lush savannah. Every blade of grass timbers as the megaphone pounces from nature’s amplifier to the belly of brilliant cities. A subway rattling away from its transfer leaves the same ticklish hum on the earth as a thunderous running of horses without fences. How groovy is that?
I can think of only one fundamental disconnect between these two places. The wildlife world shall involuntarily ebb and flow in favor of the scavengers, while the one I’m typing you from will hunt and kill you for pleasure, or to uphold laws commanded down to the public from some boss, or simply because somebody got pissed off . . .
Who the hell we callin’ wildlife?
Our society has evolved quite unfortunate characteristics from our uncivilized beginnings. We’re afraid of the savages. We hate the symbolic, as well as the flesh and blood things which ancestrally link us with nature. The premise for growth and development we associate with culture has nothing to do with progressive improvements and everything to do with figuring out who’s deserving, and who isn’t.
Obviously, when the conquistadores started erasing indigenous tribes across the Americas, they could tell themselves that the savages didn’t deserve all this. Obviously, the fetish for slavery in the United States never distracted considerations of the men who wanted to be freed from the fist of their own colonial bully because slaves just didn’t deserve all that. Obviously, when Augusto Pinochet filled up a football stadium with people he planned on executing, he knew deep down that his political rivals didn’t deserve to be seen or heard.
Why retreat toward these ugly old bookmarks on historical injustice? Surely, our contemporary examples will illuminate it all the more clearly if you don’t know what I’m getting at yet, or if you don’t want to know.
Obviously, the desire for rent control and in a city like New York isn’t nearly as loud as the construction of the high-rise condos next door, because poor people don’t deserve to live in the capital of the world anymore. Obviously, Jamaican thugs have no problem killing an infant, pulling out its entrails, and stuffing it with drugs to be smuggled to the US, because their business is much more deserving of a chance to grow and be prosperous than a baby. Obviously, when Hurricane Katrina had cleared from the skies, but not the streets of New Orleans, George W. Bush rehearsed the monologue of the deserving as he purposely allowed the situation to spiral out of control.
That’s right. I said it. Katrina didn’t fuck up New Orleans, my government fucked up New Orleans! And these are, mind you, only surface level examples of the point I am trying to get across here. Natural resources belong in whose hands and for what end? Whose diseases will get enough fiscal support for us to keep on fighting and which ones will go unnoticed? Show me who truly deserves to sit under an air conditioner all day, freezing in the middle of the summer, doodling with a videogame on a big-ass TV with the million-watt stereo on full blast; while the power escapes a whole block of housing units proven to harbor twice as much mental illness and social inequities as a suburban area, “the projects” – or an entire grid of a city trapped inside of the earth’s majority, “the third world”.
Sympathy aside, let’s get savage. Let’s stop complaining about the way news is covered, and stampede the broadcasts behind drums and howls. Hell, I’d stuff a bone in my nose, throw a Bush twin over each shoulder and dance a little jig on Fox News just for the riot. But seriously, the need to empower our people (who I imagine are not entirely comfortable with living in the world as it presents itself today) is tremendous.
If the education system, for example, does not meet your standards, use the village curriculum to let them learn from the sort of productive citizens you want your children to become. If a hospital isn’t handling your health properly you shouldn’t have to rely on the punitive damages system for accountability. Instead, an alternative hospital of community health representatives would have a greater investment in the condition of one of their own.
Create a list of assets, ills, and institutional dimensions within you perfect neighborhood or town, and move from there. Any ideas? I want to hear them and work out their kinks together and then media blitz them to leaders and pundits and heads and soldiers until the common exchange of the ideas becomes common practice.
So, I’m dedicating my life to creating at least one village, either from the cultural ruins of one that used to have the mosaic pulse of an artistic and social oasis, or more figuratively, a community of voices all over the world that share knowledge and strategy before spreading it to their respective outlets.
The truth hides somewhere – between the margins – one, this hippy-ish manifesto that declares we are connected to every person and thing and fiber of existence that should, therefore, make greater contributions to sustain it in a family way. And then there’s the contradictory darkness washing over us, intellectually, informing us over our shoulders to take what we can while we can, because we can’t handle being on this planet in any other capacity.
I’m only a writer, a father, a schoolteacher, a journalist, a lucky bum from Louisville, a lover without a permanent place to live and build . . . surely, there must be others out there who are just as deserving as I.