Comfort Ye My Beasts

The measure of civility of a given society
used to be how well it treated its prisoners
and how it limited the gap between rich and poor.

But I would like to amend that measure
to how well a country treats the animals,
it rears for food production, voluntarily.
Such creatures can have no understanding
of 'the nation state', or the law or custom
that they are subject to. For this
they are concidered 'beyond dumb',
for being raised purely for consumption.

The false superiority with which
we deal with the flesh that we eat
mirrors the hidden hierarchies
which heap upon each other.

The Best Rejection

is pre-prepared, and a self made choice
in which one individual agrees with another,
mutually, to desist from further contact.

Alas, most rejection is the result
of the individual being pitched
into an undeclared competition
unawares they are being entered.

As they struggle to define The Club
that they don't want to be part of,
then the individual has to define themselves
even faster, and more thoroughly,
as something other than than The Club
wants to see them as, against their free will.

The Nobel Prize

for Hypocricy could not be awarded this year;
there were too many candidates,
consequently there was too little time
to quantify the negative effects their words
compared with what their deeds underachieved
for everyone except themselves and their familiars.

The Offshore Heart

'Where ever your treasure is, your heart will be also'.
Put your treasure abroad - whether for profit,
or to improve the discretion and choice
with which the money can do to grow by itself
and however much you might protest
that 'I put my heart into where I live,
into what I do and the family I do it for'
but at best your heart will be hardened
through division. At worst it will be beached,
shrunken and left for dead on some foriegn shore.  

Too Little Delivered Too Late Is How We Now Do Charity

Multi-national charities are now like the corporations
and third world governments whose actions
they say they exist to ameliorate-when in doubt

1-they wait for crises to grow to critical levels
and blame lack of access to the media
for not giving better warnings earlier.

2-they make big public appeals
to do something basic
to beat the imminent disaster
which is abroad-behind boundaries they don't control.
They know that even as they ask the public for support
they can't deliver what they say they want to.

3-They stock pile the help at home
far from those abroad who need it most,
delivering the the safe minimum,
and making sure the TV cameras film the delivery.
But they don't deliver help where the danger is at it's worst,
even though that is where the need is at it's greatest.

4-they use the excuse of what still needs
to be delivered to make sure that the brand
of the charity remains buoyant with the folks at home
before delivering further donations abroad.

Charities are supposed to be there to fight cleptocracies,
not steal their methods and collaborate with them.

Some Things Feed Themselves

Not that they will tell you that without prompting.....

Disability vs Awareness

The deaf
are less obvious
than the blind,
and the dumb
are less obvious
than the deaf.

But this is no rule of thumb.