Last words
For the last couple hours, I have been listening to a life struggle on the brink of death.
I refer to a fly that is trapped somewhere in my room. I don’t know precisely where he is, but I can hear him. Once every minute or two, he frantically attempts to escape from where he is stuck. It makes a buzzing sound. In the last hour, that buzzing has become less frequent. All I can think is, gosh, that noise is irritating. I hope it stops.
Do you know what it means when the buzzing sound stops? It means the fly is DEAD. It means that there was a living creature somewhere in my room, struggling to stay alive, and I sat by listening to his death pleas, doing nothing, and the only thing that crossed my mind was, “gosh, that noise is irritating”, followed by, “hey, I should blog about this!”
If this fly was a human, you’d be coming at me with the police and handcuffs. If this fly was a dog or cat, you’d be coming at me with pitchforks and PETA. But this fly is a fly, and everyday in the world people are putting flies out of their misery, and nobody bats an eye.
If we bring humans, household pets and household pests down to their simplest form, they are all lives. They are all alive. They all have eyes. They all have hearts. They all even have nervous systems. Earlier this month, I dished out a small portion of my savings fund to save my rabbit’s life. There are people in the world who hunt rabbits for fun. Who am I to decide who’s more superior to live?
White flag
There will always be people in the world who will try to tear you down.
We don’t always mean harm, even if we cause it. It has been said before that we can only hate the things in people that we ourselves have within us. Sometimes, we lash out; problems, clutter and baggage in our lives can wear down our abilities to be empathetic and cut our human patience short.
Sometimes, it’s just a matter of being in the wrong place, at the wrong time. There are times in life where we are more quick to snap; more quick to find an outlet to release our own frustrations and shortcomings on to someone else. One day we’ll feel bad that that outlet had to be you.
How were YOU punished?
Switches? Soap in the mouth? Food deprivation? Cold showers? Spankings? Cayenne pepper?
Call my naivety what you want, but I am appalled to have recently learned that the above punishments are actually considered “acceptable” by a disturbingly large number of parents. How this could be is completely and utterly beyond my farthest stretch of logic, because quite frankly, I don’t believe for even a second that you could starve, beat, or shove soap in your child’s mouth out of “love”. That’s total bullshit. Barbaric. Inhumane. Absolutely, undeniably, without a doubt appalling.
The same parents will often tell you that these children “need” these types of punishments. Somehow, this doesn’t surprise me in the least. You raised them to be this way - of course its your fault that your child is a raving brat. Don’t make matters worse by taking your own failures as a parent out on your child. Didn’t *your* parents ever teach you that violence and anger solve nothing?
Oddly enough, it seems that few to none of my Canadian friends were raised this way, yet many of my American friends were… So I’m curious to know: Were you punished as a child? How? If so, looking back now, do you believe that it “fixed” anything, or did it make matters worse? Would you punish your child in the same way?
