RANT: THE MILK OF HUMAN KINDNESS

I'M FEEDING A STRAY THESE DAYS, a small, really sweet-tempered cat with gorgeous, glossy black fur. She (the young girl next door has named her “Princess”, but I can’t quite bring myself to use that moniker so, privately, I call her “Maya”. (It’s a nice name, I think.) She goes between the two houses (and my neighbours downstairs) so “Princess”/”Maya”/”Blackie” (downstairs calls her “Blackie”) probably gets a good feed, though she’s still slim and agile as a cat! Sometimes she comes over when I’m on my porch, has a snack and a cat nap on the sunny windowsill in my living room, and then leaves—a real outdoors-type that one!  Anyway, I hope my Christian Charity bona fides are secure after my outlay of cat food….

Maya After Finding the Catnip Toy

So, kindness to a kitty; kindness to a stranger, kindness to the ones you love. And especially to the ones you don’t. Maybe this strange time of Covid will help us learn to be kinder to each other because, when we emerge from our bunkers and toss away our masks, there will be a need for a whole lot of that virtue in the coming years.

I’ve mentioned this before, but a better time to be alive might have been just after the last ice age, a time when the great glaciers were retreating, and it was warming up ever so nicely. I’ve read a bit about that era in our prehistory—before agriculture and cities, before almost everything—when our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopted new ways of living as the world changed around them. Our world is changing, too. Perhaps not as dramatically as an ice age, but climate change may bring with it far warmer temperatures than we’ve been used to for the last several millennia. We all know this, of course. Are we prepared? Will we prepare? And what can we learn from our ancient ancestors who were confronted with such an upturning of the world?

I’ll again recommend Christopher Ryan’s excellent Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress, for his helpful examination of the lifestyles of Stone Age hunter-gatherers, as well as his speculations on their social, psychological and spiritual makeup. We can say with confidence they were people in touch with the land because they had to be in order to survive. Today, we think we’ve left the land and its concern’s behind with our science and technology and complex social orderings, but we haven’t, really—we’ve dug ourselves a really big hole and only now we realize we’re at the bottom of it.

Jim Kunstler, in his new book Living in the Long Emergency quotes entrepreneur Elon Musk as he speculates on the future: “The future is vastly more exciting and interesting if we’re a space-faring civilization and a multi-planetary species than if we’re not.” (Emergency, 21)

Dryly, Kunstler rebuts:

 “Well, I’m not so sure. Unless, that is, we’re tired of the possibilities for joy, meaning, and excitement on a planet (this one: Earth) that we are superbly fitted to thrive on—and which, sadly, were in the process of damaging quite recklessly with our current activities, including shooting a lot of junk* into orbit around it.” (21)

How we engage with others, what are expectations are, what we expect from them and, in turn, what they can expect from us, will all be critical factors in how stable and how civil our societies will be, going forward. As Ryan and JHK and others have pointed out civility, decorum, social norms and etiquette, ways of communicating, ‘rules of engagement’ will all be part of the package when it comes to how we act with others in a public arena, and how successful and acceptable those actions will be. For today, I’ll leave a bowl of milk out, and start with being kind to a little critter that understands kindness far better than I ever have.

 

Cheers, Jake.  

 

(I’m still reading JHK’s new book, and hope to have a book report ready soon.)

 

 

 

 * The brash billionaire had in 2018 launched into space a rocket-ship with a mannequin seated in roadster convertible; it was a publicity stunt to garner attention for his new SpaceX company, or “junk” as JHK rightly points out. (Musk is also making ‘plans’ to colonize Mars. Well, aren’t we all?)