Thanks but no thanks
It’s nice to think that - on the whole - there is a balance; that we can agree with the poet that, indeed, it is true there are:
So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.
Yes, certainly, the seasons come and go - and there is a time for weddings and a time to bury a spouse. Why though does it look as if humans must always be so desperately unbalanced? Not merely brother set against brother but more like fruitcakes fighting bugs? What evil or plain incompetent God made us to be this insane?
So, in the richest country the world has ever known a man is, in yet another decadent pursuit of purpose, effectively tortured to death - while in other parts of the world people are burnt alive and stoned to death. Just business as usual in the human heart, of course.
Still, news also reached us that an Austrian court is in the process of deciding whether apes should have the same rights as human beings.
How nice.
Next rights that then might be granted to them would possibly be the right to work in our factories - the great honour to fight in our wars.
They could also share with us our rituals of power and wealth, our traditions and our systems of patronage and entitlement.
Then, they might join us in our strange courtship dances and our tastes for the bizarre and the unspeakable.
They could read our holy texts and pray to all the various weird Aspects of our many, many Gods.
They would also be most welcome, of course, to share our general paranoia - and become, like us, totally bewildered by the worlds we forged, the cages we built for ourselves. In short, they could become as absolutely useless and utterly clueless as we have made ourselves to be.
Or they could, if they are indeed as smart as their advocates claim they are, just tell all those nice Austrian judges to stick it where the sun won’t shine.
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