My resolution this Earth Day is to treat reptiles with respect, hence this post.
The resolution was inspired by recent comments from talk show host Thom Hartmann comparing U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz with reptiles. His comment, if I heard aright, was that the Texas senator, like reptiles, is incapable of emotion and empathy because his brain, like a reptile's, lacks a limbic system.
Consequently, this is posted in defense of reptiles.
This is not merely a joke at the expense of Sen. Cruz. It's a caution against a habit of thought which pervades our culture and threatens our survival.
That hazard -- and its counterpoint -- may best be illuminated by a tale from the East Coast of the (now) U.S. in the 17th Century.
A European immigrant and a Red Man were walking along a forest path when they chanced upon a red and black snake. The native took a portion of tobacco from his pendachsenacan and offered it to the snake, without asking for payment.
The European chastised the native for this gift, because, he said, the snake was evil.
The native objected that the snake was "beautiful."
Such, at least, is the European version of the story.
In fact, the word for "beautiful" in the Algonquain-group language spoken by the American doesn't just mean "very pretty." It carries connotations of the rising sun, the life force, warmth, survival, holiness and the color red.
(Words work that way in an original language, and it explains why some consider it sacrilege to turn "redskin" into a slur, even in English translation.)
In those days of primitive, unified language, our hunter-gatherer ancestors had a unitary view of their cosmos. They knew everything in Creation had spirit, and required respect.
They knew animals are our relatives, a realization science reached only in the last century. To feed themselves they supplicated the spirit of their prey, and their prayers were answered when the location of the body and blood sought appeared in their dreams.
When they received the gift, they gave thanks.
They were intellectually incapable of seeing others as inferiors, except for dishonorable conduct such as lying.
Later, after they'd learned to raise excess grain, and invented cities and hierarchies, and domesticated animals which they then slaughtered en masse for "piety" or as an industrial food supply, it no longer was convenient to see other animals as relatives with soul.
And, lacking souls, Judas goats never spent a night sleepless for having fatally deceived their fellows.
Those who accept the conception of a spirit which survives the physical body, by contrast, are obliged to act with integrity.
A case in point showed itself on a sunny day on the California coast when I was with no other human.
Having been in the surf, I wore my best birthday suit as I sat smoking my hoboken on a little use trail on a grassy hill a bit above the Pacific.
After a time my peripheral vision was alerted by motion to my right and a few feet down the hill. It was a young rattlesnake, taking the measure of the great mammal blocking his path with a bare gluteal mass.
Computation in the backs of our minds quickly established I was too large for the snake to swallow, even if he was starving.
And I knew, if the snake didn't, that nearly all humans bitten by rattlesnakes in California are young, male and drunk. I wasn't drunk.
You might, if you choose, decline to believe that empathic communication between the snake and me ensued. I thought, and to this day think, it did.
Part of our conversation, of course, was sensory. I didn't rise, or take a defensive weapon in hand. The snake didn't double back on itself in a defensive posture.
We both fitted our actions to our pacific thoughts.
After a meaningful pause the snake continued up the hill, detouring above me and behind my butt.
Now had the snake lacked the "live and let live" attitude common to the non-ravenous members of his race, he might have acted differently.
If he'd harbored ambition to be President of the United Snakes of That Little Hill, and realized that in current right-wing politics there's no such thing as bad character, or bad publicity, for those who are duly worshipful of Mammon, he might have organized a massive response by younger, gullible rattlesnakes to the mammal menace blocking their public highway.
This rising of the reptiles would have injured many of the militiasnakes, perhaps killed a few, and sent me to the hospital seeking antivenin.
But it would have made our young general a legend among rattlesnakes.
The notion that "lower" animals lack the moral capacities of mankind seems suspect, particularly given the number of "scientific" standards of human uniqueness which have faded in the light of observation.
At one time homo was he critter so smart he named himself "sapiens" twice, as if he didn't believe it the first time he said he was like, a really smart, stable genius.
When we're chopping away ever more of our biosphere's lungs to make ever more cheeseburgers to produce ever more cancer and heart disease, perhaps it's time to shutter the dark, satanic mills of our minds which render other creatures our soulless inferiors.
They've yet to be seen punching holes in our little, blue-green lifeboat.
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