Blazing Minds

Greetings, my name is Angus Maiden and I come from Planet Earth in peace! I am using Google’s new auto-mind-meld to communicate with you, citizens of Venus. Wait… am I in the right place? Oh I see I had num-lock on, now it all makes sense…

Revised greeting: yo, I’m Gus and I’ve been invited by Karen to contribute to this blog. I won’t bore you with who I am or what I’m about, but will rather immediately begin a spiel on whatever pops into my mind first…

Ants. I was outside just about an hour ago enjoying a delicious cigar in the fading daylight, when I noticed an ant crawling on my leg. At the same time my phone rang but I really wanted to get the ant off my body before it headed towards my nether regions, as the direction of its antennae indicated it was moving towards. In the spur of the moment I answered the phone with one hand, and with the other callously picked up the ant and squished it.

Do NOT do this. All life is precious. I immediately felt a pang of guilt as I flicked away the ruined, twisted carcass of some Queen’s son. The act of picking up a piece of plastic and talking into it caused me to not think of the value of life, not take the time to gently coax the ant into safer territory. As a result who knows what chain reaction could have occured within the nest that once was home to a busy and happy, living creature. He could have been on a mission to find a source of food for the colony, he could have been on a twilight stroll to visit a lover.

Am I hippy? Yes! But that doesn’t make the point any less valid. For thousands of years humans have continued to exert their dominance over the rest of the inhabitants of this planet, and only now are we feeling its effects. My point about the ant is that it’s the little things we do that make a difference. If an ant is about to invade your underpants don’t just kill it, put it safely on the ground. There are some instances where killing is necessary. We are entitled to clean pantries and anyone who knows me knows my love of steak, through which many a cow has died for me. If you are a meat eater you shouldn’t feel ashamed of killing something to eat it, it’s survival, and it’s natural. Yet there’s a difference between killing for necessity and pointless acts that end life.

There will always be war. Greed, religion, …, well, I can’t think of a third point: greed and religion cause war. War is about killing. So is terrorism. Yet just as I salivate at the thought of a piece of dead cow yet mourn the loss of an ant, some wars are justified and others are acts of greed. The War of Independence in America was about values, it was about identity, about unification under a single flag against a rule that was considered unjust by all subject to it. The Civil War in America was about freedom for African slaves, something surely worth fighting for, and now we have a black President of the USA. We have come far, yet acts of terrorism are the ant that you flick away. The fly you pull the wings off for entertainment, the deer you shoot for sport. Pointless wastes of many lives. I hate religion and all the crimes that have been persecuted in its name, in the name of God. I hate the car-bombers in Pakistan, the Taliban for 9/11 and the attrocities they subject the people of Afghanistan under their tyranny to. Yet I think, as an Australian Citizen, it is right to send Australian troops alongside our Allies to fight that tyranny, and yes, to kill.

It all comes down to necessity. Does Allah really want school buses blown up? I think not. It is pointless and only breeds hate. Yet the fundamentalists say a book told them to, in the name of Allah. Did God want to send 13 year old children on a Crusade to reclaim the holy land and waste their lives, as well as force them to kill any who stood in their way? I think not. Yet it happened, in the name of God. Did I really need to kill that ant? No.

Yet do I really need a balanced diet including meat? Well, yes.

Is liberating Afghanistan justified? Yes.

I used to be a lot purer than this, I used to abhor killing in all forms. But fuck man, the suicide bombers, the Taliban, Al Kaeder, fundamendalists and zealouts, we need to fight them and if people die on the way: it’s a necessity.

At the same time, I turn around and have a good long objective look at what I’ve just said. Am I not as bad as a suicide bomber who claims that the end result of going to heaven and having 72 virgin lovers is worth the killing? Am I justified in even saying that I ” need” to eat steak?

It’s your internet, the place where you can be free, so let fly thine words. Let’s discuss this!

Some introduction, ey. I promise not all of my posts will be this heavy.

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Related posts:

1. Another Poem from Angus
2. Blogger Interviews, this week with Angelika
3. An Introduction to the Guest Bloggers on Blazing Minds
4. Blazing Minds Interviews Blogger Brad Reason
5. Guest Posts on Blazing Minds in 2009

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 8:41 am and is filed under Earth, Guests Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.