Via Rod Dreher, members of the Animal Liberation Front wishing an excruciating death upon a ten-year-old boy suffering from terminal cancer:
I can only hope the boy's death was a painful one. If you think about it though, this story has a somewhat happy ending. A young boy dying; therefore he can not grow up, spawn some other mutant losers and teach them how to hunt. I wonder how satan is treating him???(Note: the ALF site requires registration, a procedure to which I will not submit; hence, my quotation of the fool Dreher cites, Dreher having his ways.)
My initial reaction is on the order of, "I wish Satan would come quickly to claim his sons and daughters of the ALF." My second thoughts are on the order of, "I hope that God will grant Satan the liberty to claim his children of the ALF."
I don't have any third thoughts, any reconsiderations, beyond the observation that, if this is the face of environmentalism and conservationism, it is no wonder that most Americans simply roll their eyes and continue to live as though the modern, suburban lifestyle could be perpetuated indefinitely, which it cannot. These things are all rolled together in the American consciousness. I'm much more sympathetic to conservation concerns that most conservatives, so far as I can determine, but given the choice between folks like the ALF on the one hand, and shooting bears and guzzling gas on the other, well, I'd like to drive my Yukon to every last state and national park and shoot a bear in each one.
Comments (4)
I will quite possibly be alone in finding the following apropos of this post:
“Once man, separated from Creator and creation alike, became individual—in other words, fracture and fissure in Being—and once he learned, assuming his name to the point of provocation, that he was mortal, his pride was thereby magnified, no less than he confusion. At last he was dying in his own way—he was proud of that; but he was dying, dying altogether—and that was humiliating. No longer reconciled to a denouement once fiercely desired, he turns at last, and longingly, to the animals, his former companions: all, vile and noble alike, accept their fate, enjoy it or resign themselves to it; none has followed his example or imitated his rebellion. The plants, more than the beasts, rejoice to have been created: the very nettle still flourishes within God; only man suffocates there, and is it not this choking sensation which led him to stand apart from the rest of creation, a consenting outcast, a voluntary reject? All other living beings, by the very fact that they are identical with their condition, have a certain superiority to him. And it is when he envies them, when he longs for their impersonal glory, that man understands the gravity of his case.”
~ E. M. Cioran, The Fall into Time, “The Tree of Life”
Posted by Rodak | October 25, 2007 12:48 PM
It is pretty clear that Satan has already claimed ALF members as his own.
If E.M. Cioran's speaking of animals as having human powers of rebellion, resigning themselves to fate, rejoicing in being created, etc, is meant literally rather than metaphorically, it is simply stupid.
Posted by rjp | October 26, 2007 9:38 AM
I don't think that's what Ciroran's saying. What he's saying is that the real evil comes when men envy the animal thier natural condition.
Posted by Danby | October 26, 2007 1:46 PM
J.R.R.Tolkien, from "On Fairy Stories":
"The natural love of men not wholly corrupt for beasts, and the human desire to 'get inside the skin' of living things, has run riot. We now get men who love animals more than men; who pity sheep so much that they curse shepherds as wolves; who weep over a slain war-horse and vilify dead soldiers."
I don't hope that Satan will come and claim the members of ALF, though they are clearly his own; I hope and pray that they will repent. However, I'm not optimistic.
Posted by Trish | October 26, 2007 9:41 PM