“We’ll be blamed,” said a small voice. It was Mausi, a young friend of the Doe I Know, my beloved DIK.
“Blamed? For what?” I asked the tiny creature, a sensitive, intelligent mammal with a tendency towards anxiety.
“For the virus. The humans will say it came from animals and will want all animals destroyed.”
“Steady, Mausi,” I counselled, in my best wise elder voice, which, for a rabbit, is not unpleasant. “For one thing, humans like to eat animals, so destroying them all won’t be popular.”
That did not go over well. The poor little creature bared her teeth.
“Look at it another way,” I said, hoping to stop her from jumping off a high wall into the sea. “It’s not that animals are causing the virus, it’s that humans are destroying the climate and our habitat, forcing us to be living cheek by jowl with them; and the things that live in us jump more easily into them.”
I had been reading Ed Yong in the Atlantic, his thorough, devastating history and analysis of the mishandling of the COVID-19 plague in the USA, and his succinct list of recommendations for fixing the problem in the future.
“Oh, oh, oh,” cried Mausi. Her anxiety levels were not easing, her thin high voice fading as she wandered away from the fount of wisdom.
I turned to musing. Much of the virus catastrophe has been fuelled by bad behaviour, ugly behaviour, inflamed in several countries by malevolent, monstrously inept leaders. I thought of Neil Young’s new song Looking for a Leader – 2020, which had brought back to the AR — not a boomer, perhaps, nor a thumper, but a rabbit inspired in the 60s — that fine old spirit of hopeful rebellion.
Why has he, the Preposterous Pump, why have they, we, behaved so badly? Ed Yong lays out core causes for the USA, certainly. I would suggest that greed is at the bottom of it, the ceaseless craving for more and more, when more and more does not help but harms. The putting a dollar on everything, instead putting the heart first and enlisting the dollar to follow.
As a Canadian cabinet minster Eric Kieran said many years ago, corporations have no soul. And as the AR says, capitalism has no conscience. They are not always bad, even inherently bad, they are just not actively good.
It is up to us, each of us, every day, everywhere. To put people above dollars. To be decent. To be fair. To be honest, courageous, compassionate, to care about others, about the collective good, to raise our children well. Mausi.
It was George Orwell, he who understood his own day and predicted dark futures, who so well advanced the case for common decency.
The Authorial Rabbit makes a mental note to refer dear Mausi to the Orwell Foundation and its Orwell Youth Prize page on fairness.
As Orwell advised, we must work harder to understand the emotional lives of all people before we go riding about on our own agendas, even if our intent was originally good: their fears and terrors, their losses, their hopes. We can build a happier, safer world when people understand and care for each other, all people, all ages, races, sexes, income levels, all religions.
The caring is not always easy, but we need reminding from time to time it is our natural inheritance. Altruism, not selfishness, is our most successful strategy. We function better individually and collectively when we acknowledge this.
Often a shift in consciousness is required, a return after drifting into danger. Its reward comes immediately to the practitioner, to the practitioner’s own mind. The first victim of hate is the hater. The first to be healed by compassion is the compassionate, after which all benefit.
J. B. Thompson 