I am humbled in the realization of how limited I am regarding the dimension of my sense of knowing. How can I feel any kind of assurance about my view of the nature of life—with all of its micro and macro Cosmic dimensions—when I may well only be peeking through a tiny hole?
Eat and be eaten is a normal, primal life equation, but what is human life eating and what is eating human life?
Centered around what I will call the Rural Boy, is a story about the character of the “Red Neck Cowboy” (RNC). (humor may get through the psychic blockade where facts won’t enter)
In rural America the quality of the beast meets the quality of its trainer. This is then a question of the circumstance and resources that develop the character, nature, and quality of individual life.
The rural intellect, its development and awareness, is very different than the intensity and chaos of the big city.
I suspect the child is smothered and overwhelmed more in the city—intensity and focus of parental attention? This in itself is worth looking at—the nature and character of both areas rural and urban—as the core content and molding of a child’s development and world view.
What do we expect as a behavior outcome of the RNC’s world view, and what can we expect as an outcome of their behavior, intellect and social skills overall—given the quality of their development, education and circumstances?
In essence we are blind and detached from concern until we see or encounter something radical, hateful, and violent that we may be forced to experience and witness in spite of our denial.
Why should the estranged RNC not respond to goodwill? The many answers to these unanswered questions trail off into mostly reaction and judgment. But, there is a simple behavioral outline that will give us a better understanding of why they react without self reflection—regarding their response to ‘the other’.
It is not necessarily the motive of the community to spend energy and resources to resolve it and prevent the alienation.
What would help to resolve it and what will happen if it is not restored?
In our search for a responsible social order, we are not equipped with the collective will, commitment, and knowledge of human and animal behavior, and the patience it takes to understand how it works. We are not able, as a whole, to give ourselves to knowing our own character at the behavioral base of the human animal—this awareness is developed by very few human beings. Current leadership does not know what to do, nor do they know how to trust others who do.
How many understand enough about the given nature of social and individual behavior of human beings? Or, of how nature’s dynamic is met in the animal kingdom overall? Most humans wish to separate themselves from the animal reality in their identity’s exclusion.
There is a great deal I don’t know or understand, but I do know a good story when I hear one.
. . . And within this story lie clues that might move us forward in our quest toward balance as a nation, and the world for that matter!
It’s about restoring a collapsed ecosphere in Uganda, where humans have been killing each other by the hundreds of thousands for the last 15 years.
Over this same 15 year period they also killed most of the animal predators, thus having destroyed the balance of the ecology of everyone and everything—plant and animal alike. This destroyed the natural, biological, and ecological balance through disturbance of the functional order of the environment and all that lived in it.
After the humans gave up fighting each other, and having destroyed their own life means, the animal life began to recover, but has remained without enough predators to restore a much needed balance.
Because their world is now free of predators they have relaxed, mixed without fear, roamed about free of territorial boundaries, while grazing for food and water. They became fat, comfortable, and overpopulated—creating an environmental crisis.
In a circumstance of desperation a group of inspired scientists, along with a team from the National Park System, sought to restore the natural balance of the park territory by reintroducing many of the lost predators, so as to restore the dynamic of fear or threat of being eaten. This in turn woke up the factor of all the animals to be alert and aware that returned them to the norm of the primal character of behavior and response in the environmental totality that had returned to its natural balance.
Someone had the knowledge and insight to know that it was the fear from predators that would bring them back into balance with the whole environmental ecosystem. Things such as regulation of the overpopulation of grazers which, having gone unchecked, decimated the grasslands and intruded into the forests.
This characteristic of balance—in the equation of eat-and-be-eaten as a balanced norm of life on earth—I sense to be something that has existed forever. It brings to mind the question of: What is a balanced use and character of human populations?
Is there a mechanism similar for today’s society, an equivalent to the purpose that predators serve in nature’s biological dynamic of balance?
And finally, there is no doubt that humanity is out of balance with physical nature, but can there be another kind of less violent regulator of balance that can restore us to a more sustainable way of living on the Earth? One without the anger and rage that accompanies the murdering of our fellow Man, and at the same time not having to destroy everything else?
What is humanity’s predator? War?
Is Fear and respect the same thing?
Is the rural fear that of financial lack—feeling trapped by the diminishment of resources to create financial opportunity?
Is this the fear that generates Red Neck Cowboy’s anger, doubt and mistrust?