Monthly Archives: October 2011

Cardinals Rally Squirrel, what about your rights?

Posted on by PalangL

cardinals, squirrel tails, animal rights, baseball, saint louis

Cardinals Rally Squirrel

People in Saint Louis, Missouri, USA, are supposedly wearing real squirrel tails on their baseball hats to support their team, the Cardinals, or even to support charity alongside with that since the tails are marketed for that purpose too, ever since recently a squirrel ran over the play field and the idea came up for the crowd to have a or this squirrel as a mascot.

Obviously the hoard of fans are (like in many cases where animals are involved in such circumstances) unreasonable enough to not care about wildlife, nonhuman animal well being and nonhuman animal life. They seem to see squirrels as something like a “cute pest” which sounds oxymoronic, but that would explain why on one hand they like squirrels but on the other hand they like them dead too at the same time, so that they can stick the animals’ tails to their baseball hats?

A friend from STL says “On the Channel 2 news, Mandy Murphy, stressed : “… and those are *real* Squirrel tails !” While footage of a huge crowd at the stadium was being shown. As if that was something good. I’m not sure now if what Mandy Murphy said was accurate or not. I assumed they were fake before I heard her say that. I think the original Rally Squirrel was set free, if I heard correctly. I know that some people are eager to involve real dead Squirrels, see : Taxidermist Hops on Rally Squirrel Bandwagon.”

It’s more than a shame that Tony La Russa, the Cardinals manager, who is an avid animal welfare advocate, see his foundation: http://www.arf.net , is maybe something like a speciesist by not saying anything against the squirrel craze if it leads to using dead squirrel parts to promote his team and charity work connected with baseball.

* WHY was it possible to sneak dead animal parts into the craze if people were considerate about the actual animals? “When we heard the squirrel merchandise had sold out so quickly, we went to our backup supplier, ebay. Somebody was selling Rally Squirrel earrings, an RS Christmas ornament, and tee shirts. But one guy who is a taxidermist was selling a real stuffed squirrel on which he has mounted a little plastic red cap so that you can have your very own (stuffed) rally squirrel. Bidding already had reached $84.99 when we checked yesterday morning.” St. Louis gets squirrelly

* ALSO what does this suggest ? : ‘ [...] … customer’s request for “five-hundred squirrel tails”. Not full costumes, just the tails – apparently for use during the Cards’ upcoming home games against Milwaukee this week in the National League Championship Series. “We can help him out,” Brock quickly pointed out. “But it’s not an item that anybody manufactures. You can’t go out and find a squirrel tail company.” ” Johnnie Brock’s Sells Out Of Squirrel Costumes

Does life have to be tragic?

Posted on by PalangL

Does life have to be tragic?

Certainly people create situations for each other as human beings, but far more than that even for other, nonhuman animal beings and the natural world and the world as a whole, situations which can’t even be hardly fathomed anymore by a word such as “tragic”, situations which leave the one who experiences them horrified and terrified, sad to the highest extent.

“Tragic” is something personal, something that can’t be really located in the broad and politically relevant context, when it refers to the experience of an individual.

No matter what though, we all do suffer from tragic fates, caused by the impacts humans create.

How do we handle our personal tragic experiences, and not let ourselves be emotionally drowned by the bad experiences and thus by others causing such feelings in us?

I think it’s important that we connect that what happens to us personally (I mean on the very private and personal scale) to that what happens in the world and with the world overall. Our personal tragedy is caused by humans who ignore that their lifestyles in all aspects (the ideas the propagate, their behavior, the practical impacts of their doings and their “havings”) affect the actual life of single individuals on really all possible scales.

Humans in the western world on average seek to rationalize their lifestyle by terms such as what is “in” and what “I should have” / own / possess, what is “normal”, what should be everybody’s standard, what is it that “I like”, that “I want”, that I “need”.

The question about the broad “you” is not interesting and even a no no. One simply works against it. The “you” is something like an opposing principle.

We need this “you” to live though! But we should be aware not to reduce it to be a fake “you”, which would consist just of clones of ourselves. It’s a matter of perspective. There is a difference between a collective egotism and an individualist “concernism” or altruism.

Tragedy hinders us from connecting to the other, we become locked within the perspective of the “I” involuntarily. But as we can’t share the feelings of an egotist who causes us to feel tragic in the first place, we end up suffering from the separation we feel between a locked “I” and an out-locked “you”.

Let’s break out of the locked “I” condition when we feel our tragedy, and let’s always see that we are connected with the many “you’s”.

 


on the multiplicity of meaningfulness

Posted on by PalangL

A concern is a concern, and should and can be “of concern” / “something that concerns one”, even if it’s not a concern to many people.

An issue is of importance, even if that issue is not a story that makes the headlines. We get easily drawn into the streams (!) of uniform opinions, thoughts and feelings, when one issue is played up and stands on the main menu of “today’s top stories”. We easily lose out of sight that our individual thinking and actions need more independence and that our thinking and actions should not be a play-ball of the “moods of the masses”.

When our own individual thinking becomes only a part of one big uniform stream of opinions (that heads just in the one “either-or” direction), our existence shrinks to a binary reducedness. We could end up being one of those “zombies” that we run into every day. Those type of people that are straight one of the stupid or one of the smart side. Life however goes beyond us being stupid or smart, I think life is so complex that leaving all our doors of perception open to what we can learn from it, requires us to allow a full multiplicity of a meaningfulness that does cover more than just our own “insight/s of humanity”. We need an outlook onto all concerns. Beyond homocentrism.

 

a linoleum print by Farangis G. Yegane