The brutal video that came out recently of Des Hague, the CEO of a multinational corporation, raised the ire of the social media world and caused his “resignation” shortly thereafter.
This isn’t an examination of whether social uproar should be a judge and jury, or whether the punishment he received for his actions was just, though.
This is a very quick discussion of how deplorable I see these types of acts and how we shouldn’t be tolerating it in a civilized society.
No, wait, I’m going to change my phrasing. We shouldn’t be “not tolerating” it. We should be actively combating it.
People who treat others with violence and menace, the ones who beat other beings of this planet and subdue them with cruelty, are just straight-up terrible humans. That goes for whether the one(s) they are treating this way are human or “beast.”
What right does one have to force feelings of pain, sorrow and fear on another? Nobody and nothing should be forced to cower.
The Paws for a Cause event held last weekend in Nunn’s Creek Park is the SPCA’s way of bringing attention to the cause of fighting animal cruelty, and I commend and respect them for that. They do good work, and I’m so glad that they are coming back to the community. See you at the grand re-opening?
At the heart of the issue of animal cruelty, however, is the complacency I see in our society in response to cruelty in general, and our indolent nature in terms of engaging with this topic when it comes to pets.
Every time we see someone jerking a leash when walking their dog, they are asserting power through violence and fear. Yet we just drive by and shake our heads in disgust instead of addressing the issue.
Let me be clear. I’m not advocating vigilante justice or anything. I don’t want people to be pulling over to the side of the road and accosting those poor souls who don’t see that what they’re doing is wrong.
I’m saying we need to have a serious discussion as a society and decide the value we place on life and living with emotional pain. We need to encourage people to look at things in terms of minimizing the infliction of damage we do to others, whether those others are, as I said earlier, human or “beast.”
We need to support those who look at things in the seemingly-old-fashioned, “treat others how you would like to be treated,” way that we were all (hopefully) taught as kids.
Maybe we should celebrate people who live that way, and hopefully those who don’t will adjust their ways when they see, as another old saying goes, that you really do catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. I think we’ll eventually see less leash jerking, and less leash jerking will lead to fewer elevator kicks.
We can all agree the world would be better with fewer elevator kicks, right?
And less cowering. The world needs less cowering, too.