I don't think this can be said enough, the conflict is between those who, for a wide range of reasons, prompted by an even wider range of motives, champion the wilderness, and the wild life that still lives in the wilderness - and those to whom anything that can't stop them is prey.
We're fighting a moral issue, a moral battle, against an opponent who has no moral being whatsoever.
The manatee makes a good symbolic token in that fight, for a lot of reasons. But it's not about the manatee, ultimately it's about the way we live, and that will, over time, determine who lives, who breeds, and who gets weeded out.
Religion seems to offer a refuge from that fight, but what it really offers is encapsulated in the stories repeated up and down California in the 18th century, at the Spanish missions. People whose ways of living were blocked and sabotaged, whose young men were killed defending those ways of living, were faced with the choice of independently starving and living like scavengers out on the margins of their former home lands, or going in to the missions and becoming that abject thing, the transitional half-caste, the cultural half-breed.
The best teachings of the best religions put you right back on the front lines. All the rest is cowardice and rationalized surrender.
Too many of us tried for too long to put it into the terms and mandates of the dominant side. Their morality has no place for wilderness. It's a null entity in the court room, an unowned thing, a void, real only as a resource to be exploited or as a threat to be subdued. And their morality has no place for animals, except as servants or prey. Demanding an equality for bears before the law is seen as treachery, as treason, when it isn't scorned and ridiculed as childish.
And so, too often we lose before we begin to fight. The core problem seems to be the sense we have, most of us, that we can't survive without the dominant side, that we won't survive an all or nothing conflict with them. We're a minority, and not even a unanimous one.
There was a broad change in the common point of view three decades ago, a kind of return toward health and - more importantly - the desire for health, a desire which can exist even in the most ill.
That's been replaced with fear, which, in people whose tendency toward cowardice has been encouraged and developed with the tools of gratification and grafted desire, makes it impossible to keep that healthy point of view from slipping into the kind of dim-witted pragmatism that cooks its seed corn in a lean time. Indigenous cultures were and are the seed corn of the human race.
Appealing to the long-range goals we all seem to share - generations of children having a better life, the vision of some greatly distant time being a realization of a potential we can feel in ourselves, doesn't work on those who know better than anyone that they will have to sacrifice themselves to make that vision possible. That's the spirit that kills the manatee, that kills the wolf and the whale, that kills the earth.
Petulant and doomed, hating itself and its cause and its future. That's why you can see gloating on the faces of the men who make these heartless decisions and mask their heartlessness with the noises of compassion. Saving people's lives before the camera while behind the scenes they doom us all.
The point is that sometime soon the moment will come and go, when it will be time to fight, with all that that implies. The one thing everyone will need, the only thing really, because it isn't the kind of war that will be won with bombs and guns, is a willingness to sacrifice. And what's called the ultimate sacrifice is something everyone can make.
Being willing to sacrifice your own life for things you will never see seems insane, now, but it isn't.
We owe our lives to exactly that kind of sacrifice. Each of us does.
We're fighting a moral issue, a moral battle, against an opponent who has no moral being whatsoever.
The manatee makes a good symbolic token in that fight, for a lot of reasons. But it's not about the manatee, ultimately it's about the way we live, and that will, over time, determine who lives, who breeds, and who gets weeded out.
Religion seems to offer a refuge from that fight, but what it really offers is encapsulated in the stories repeated up and down California in the 18th century, at the Spanish missions. People whose ways of living were blocked and sabotaged, whose young men were killed defending those ways of living, were faced with the choice of independently starving and living like scavengers out on the margins of their former home lands, or going in to the missions and becoming that abject thing, the transitional half-caste, the cultural half-breed.
The best teachings of the best religions put you right back on the front lines. All the rest is cowardice and rationalized surrender.
Too many of us tried for too long to put it into the terms and mandates of the dominant side. Their morality has no place for wilderness. It's a null entity in the court room, an unowned thing, a void, real only as a resource to be exploited or as a threat to be subdued. And their morality has no place for animals, except as servants or prey. Demanding an equality for bears before the law is seen as treachery, as treason, when it isn't scorned and ridiculed as childish.
And so, too often we lose before we begin to fight. The core problem seems to be the sense we have, most of us, that we can't survive without the dominant side, that we won't survive an all or nothing conflict with them. We're a minority, and not even a unanimous one.
There was a broad change in the common point of view three decades ago, a kind of return toward health and - more importantly - the desire for health, a desire which can exist even in the most ill.
That's been replaced with fear, which, in people whose tendency toward cowardice has been encouraged and developed with the tools of gratification and grafted desire, makes it impossible to keep that healthy point of view from slipping into the kind of dim-witted pragmatism that cooks its seed corn in a lean time. Indigenous cultures were and are the seed corn of the human race.
Appealing to the long-range goals we all seem to share - generations of children having a better life, the vision of some greatly distant time being a realization of a potential we can feel in ourselves, doesn't work on those who know better than anyone that they will have to sacrifice themselves to make that vision possible. That's the spirit that kills the manatee, that kills the wolf and the whale, that kills the earth.
Petulant and doomed, hating itself and its cause and its future. That's why you can see gloating on the faces of the men who make these heartless decisions and mask their heartlessness with the noises of compassion. Saving people's lives before the camera while behind the scenes they doom us all.
The point is that sometime soon the moment will come and go, when it will be time to fight, with all that that implies. The one thing everyone will need, the only thing really, because it isn't the kind of war that will be won with bombs and guns, is a willingness to sacrifice. And what's called the ultimate sacrifice is something everyone can make.
Being willing to sacrifice your own life for things you will never see seems insane, now, but it isn't.
We owe our lives to exactly that kind of sacrifice. Each of us does.
