Summer and Sunshine ... and then a bit of a rant

At last! the weather has turned glorious sunshine all around - a mediocre Saturday turned into the kind of Sunday that belongs firmly in nostalgic reflections of childhood summers. I spent it at the garden, listening to the French Open on a portable radio, planting tomatoes, chatting to neighbours, and generally revelling in the goodness of outside.

I'm now inside, alas, while the sun continues to shine on outside. But it shows no sign of disappearing so I'm content to be here ... kinda ...

Marx - whose name is now Steve - is getting on and hopefully, getting better ... but very very slowly. He's less yellow - and you must understand when our wonderful neighbours took him in his skin was the colour of a Crayola yellow crayon - if still very slow and a bit confused. I backed myself into a corner - or, got backed into a corner - at a dinner last week defending, slightly drunkenly, my position on my own superiority over people that would evince that kind of cruelty to anyone or anything. The response was that my categories were too easily expanded without cause - or with only subjective cause - people who mistreat animals? the questioning went - what next? The problem is reducing any idea to a policy to be applied broadly and without familiarity. I do wonder what on earth I might have in common with these people that might make me comfortable sharing anything with them - particularly representation. How can one person, one system, represent all these individuals? All these standards of living and being? I still believe what I wrote in the previous post: I am better than someone who could/would starve and neglect to the point of death any creature dependent on them. How do we judge people if not by their actions? What reason might they offer to excuse such behaviour? That they didn't think - how can that be an excuse?

I am better than that. I am expected to be better than that. I'm not talking about moral absolutes. In this case, there was no reason for that kind of cruel neglect - nothing but unwillingness to take responsibility for a creature's life. I would apply that regardless of who it was enacting the cruelty. I suppose in some way cruelty might be a rather subjective term - 'meat is murder' is one of the most inane arguments I've come across but I'm willing to allow that most commercially mass-produced meat likely is unjustifiably cruel. But surely at some level cruelty is cruelty - when it is unnecessary, wasteful, unthinking; there are few arguments I would countenance as a justification for it. I don't deny that life is cruel, but we need not be. And particularly, as here, when it is just crude thoughtlessness, neglect - there is nothing so awful as ignorance, nothing so profoundly disgusting as cruelty born of ignorance without any excuse. These people cannot claim that they did not know; knowing, then, the only conclusion is that they did not care. And that is simply not acceptable.

Did I forget that the sun is shining? Nope. Just wanted to get that out. The sun shines on; my garden will provide dinner tonight!