That's my Grandma!- Woman, 80, shoots lion to protect dog

Kind of a weird jumble of feelings here. Cheer for the Grandma? For her courage, her style, her poetic language? The gutsy pre-feminist Woman-Warrior dimensions of her power? I admire all of those elements!

Lament for the poor mountain lion who committed no crime other than being a Native natural resident of an area invaded, occupied and populated by illegal human settlers who have no business living there? There are so few wild animals still surviving in this modern robotic era of steel and concrete, that each and every one of them must be revered, worshipped and adored as the true embodiments of the Divine living among us that they are.

Laugh or cry for the dog in whose name this killing was committed? It was certainly an act of love, even if misplaced (probably shooting in the air would have been just as effective to scare off the lion, while preserving the continuity of sacred life). A dog who can inspire courageous acts of love is probably one posessed of a special and deeply cultivated personality. Probably a goofy, faithful, slurpy kind of canine philosopher I'd like to meet.

A meeting of remarkable and exceptional individual like Grandma, Dawg and Mountain Lion should not have have resulted in death. Certainly not in the death of one whose line of generations is so weak and vulnerable, so threatened that the next century may never see them alive again.

But it's the paradigm of our era: anything that is vaguely sensuous, natural, alive, untamed, self-regulating, existing outside the sphere of the marketplace elicits the immediate response to KILL IT.

Available technology makes that option feasible for anyone, even for a person without any skills, courage, endurance or determination at all. Just KILL IT.

Life-preserving options are never the first choice in anything any more. Cops shoot first and ask questions later. Soldiers invade far away countries without question and shoot to kill anyone who moves - even people on their own side - and it's not even to obey orders. They just do it for the money. Is it any wonder that civilians imitate this war against Life - validated, now, as "normalcy" by all of our social institutions - in every encounter where the situation contains the possibility of conflict? Just KILL IT.

The few of us who have studied the traditions of war and combat know something that no one is capable of believing in this modern era: warriors used to be the Protectors of Life, even of the Life of the opponent. Prime practitioners of discernment, cultivating themselves internally and refining their external martial skills so as to never kill unecessarily. There are always a hundred other options preferable, feasible, accessible, applicable to every form of confrontation and combat - whether with a beast or a human - that would not result in death. Ancient warriors taught us that those methods should always be applied first. The Divine nature and spark of awareness residing within the opponent is something, they taught, that must never be ignored. And must continue to be honored even in the rarest occasion when taking the opponent's life might be unavoidable.

But we live in an era where killing is done by button-pushing, trigger-pulling Machine Operators. Robots in human flesh using machines and tools designed to kill efficiently and without question, without worry, without personal involvement.

I don't blame the Grandma who, probably in fear and totally overwhelmed by the prevailing paradigm of our era acted out the one and only option that's been pre-programmed in her mind by television, by fake religious and corrupt civic leaders, and by a sick educational system, all rooted in our "nuclear family" structure whose main mission is to be a factory producing anti-sensuous obedient robot workers who believe they are "free" because they have a right to choose between Coke and Pepsi, and are allowed to KILL for the system. But I know that the meeting of those remarkable three individuals in Dakota could have easily turned out in no death and probably an explosion of joyful laughter for all, if the teachings of Traditional warriors and the values of ancient cultures had been preserved and honored within our educational and social systems.

But we live in an era where shallow slogans guide the fingers that pull the trigger. Unexamined motives and desires guide the path of our lives, and we are trapped in a moral cesspool where we keep going by traveling on the corpses of others. On the corpses of Divine, sensuous, self-aware and sentient beings like us.

How many corpses are my gas tank today? I can't even think about it - it's unthinkable, atrocious, true without doubt yet unknowable; that knowledge is so unbearable, that piece of awareness so painful that my only response is to just KILL IT.

Petros Evdokas
from the Belly of the Beast
petros-evdokas.cyprus-org.net/Another-sort-of-Introduction.html
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