We have a new character on the farm, and I am just getting to know her. Chloe is smart, affectionate, headstrong. She and Maria talk to one another all the time now, when she wants a carrot or to say hello, she puts her head through the gate sideways and wrinkles her nose. It usually works, Maria talks back to her all the time.
Flo is an outdoor barn cat in the summer, her headquarters is the front porch and sometimes, the wall by the garden, where mice abound. She is a graceful and signified creature. And quite murderous. She terrorizes the indomitable Fate, who will not come near her. She likes Red.
I wonder what it means to be a man. Or a moral human being? Here is Cecil’s true legacy: He calls to us to decide what kind of people we want to be.
What kind of man is Walter Palmer to slaughter a beautiful lion in the cruelest way in order to put a trophy on his wall?
What kind of man am I if I can not walk in his shoes and feel compassion for a man whose life is being brutally and cruelly dismantled by millions of invisible people hiding behind screens?
And who think destroying his life and family helps animals and makes them good human beings.
And this, of course, is the true dark magic of hatred and righteousness, we can so easily become worse than the thing we condemn. Just follow the news about Dr. Palmer and the vigilante mobs taking apart his existence and calling for the destruction of his work. If killing Cecil is an awful thing, then what are we supposed to feel about the killing of a soul and the ruining the innocent lives of the people around him?
What kind of killing is acceptable to us? The great digital jury says Dr. Palmer is no longer worthy of being treated as a human being, yet if I close my eyes, turn off my computer, and imagine his life, it seems he is all too much of a human to me.
I wrote a book about compassion last year and I said that the one thing I learned was that everyone seems to support the idea of compassion but most people believe that compassion is only for people that they like, not for people that they hate. Those, of course, are the ones who are most in need of it.
It is not enough for people to see Dr. Walter driven from his home, his life and reputation ruined, his business destroyed, his children and patients threatened, the personal life of his family stolen and disseminated to the world. Police in his community say they have received thousands of threats against his life, they are not certain he will ever be able to go home again, and the new spokespeople for the “crisis” industry, the people who help fending off the new mobs, report that he will also have to change his name and go into hiding.
Police in Zimbabwe and federal agents in Washington are investigating him and promising to hold him to account. That is the way the system works, or ought to work. But we have gone much farther than that.
You can all make up your own minds, but this extra-legal mob assault by millions on a single person brings me no joy or satisfaction, nor do I believe it will help a single animal on the earth. I learned an interesting thing this week about writing in our time: I didn’t think for a second that the idea was even interesting, but I can tell you it is now controversial to write that the children of people like Dr. Palmer do not deserve to have their lives invaded and their lives threatened by millions of strangers raging behind distant screens. “Shame on you,” wrote a woman on my Facebook Page, “you are a disgrace. Look at what he did to Cecil.”
And Patty wrote: “All the tea and sympathy for a man who is likely to flee the country to some place the extradition laws don’t apply. Palmer has plenty of money for him and his family to live well for many years.” And there it is, the mob decides what he will do and who gets tea and sympathy and who doesn’t. I wonder how Patty knows how much money Dr. Palmer has. In this kind of justice, you don’t even have to see your victims or know them, you can hunt them online. Dr. Palmer is our new Frankenstein, he is a monster, he is not deserving of any moral consideration, we can do with him what we please.
Patty is off the hook, in the name of loving animals, she doesn’t have to worry about being human. I never want to get off of that hook, I think that is what being a man means to me..
In America, hundreds of people were, in recent weeks, shot down, stabbed, beaten to death, killed by drunk drivers, some of them elderly people and children. Can you name one of them? Or one of their murderers? If you want to silence the new digital outraged on Facebook or Twitter, ask them how many of these children they can name. They vanish like the morning mist.
That is the thing about mobs, of course. They wrap themselves in the sheath of compassion, they have no grasp of what it is or means. Compassion does not seem to be a natural state, it is a lot harder to practice than rage and judgment.
It is not nearly enough any longer for the furious and the bloodthirsty to simply ruin someone’s life. When media and the digital world collide with the worst impulses of human beings, the result is the public disemboweling of a human being, to the cheers and applause of the mobs. The people who decry the murder of Cecil would be the same ones who happily have tossed Dr. Palmer to the lions in Rome. It is, for sure, one thing to condemn this man, quite another to murder his person.
When media and the new digital world collide, wrote Pope Francis in his encyclical “Laudato Si,” “their influence can stop people from learning how to live wisely, to think deeply and to love generously. In this context, the great sages of the past run the risk of going unheard amid the noise and distractions of an information overload…True wisdom, as the fruit of self-examination, dialogue and generous encounter between persons, is not acquired by a mere accumulation of data which eventually leads to overload and confusion, a sort of environmental pollution.”
It is a great and ongoing tragedy in the animal world that people are increasingly using the love of animals as a rationale for hating human beings. That is the terrible trap in which we have put Cecil and the other animals of the world, who so desperately need our real help. We take the animals we love, and we turn them into clubs to beat human beings into the ground. The human heads – farmers, carriage drivers, homeless men and women – are also the trophies of the misguided.
True wisdom does not come from angry posts on Facebook or a million tweets of the mob on Twitter. Nor does compassion, the thing to which we all say we aspire but so few seem able to practice.
I hope Dr. Palmer is punished for what he did.
I am also proud to say I feel badly for what he and his family is going through. I am sorry that this is a controversial thing to say. Power is an aphrodisiac, nobody wants to give it up. I am sorry to see the idea of the mob so glorified and accepted in modern times.
An image that keeps recurring to me is Frankenstein up in his tower staring down at the townspeople and their torches.
Can we see the monster and still feel for him? I hope I can.
At least the townspeople living around Frankenstein got to see him and confront him in the flesh. We are becoming a nation of informers and prosecutors, sitting on our widening behinds in outrage, the new national hobby. Our dialogue is marked by a lack of physical contact or any sense of responsibility for what say or do behind our screens and smartphones. We never have to sit across a table from Dr. Palmer and look him in the eye, or see his children’s faces as their lives destroyed, or wonder what will happen to his wife, or to his friends and patients, who are also being threatened and pursued by the mob that says it loves Cecil and all the animals and is determined to show it by pummeling people.
“I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all,” says the monster in Frankenstein. “I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.”
Dr. Palmer, I am a great lover of animals, they are, in many ways, my life and my work. How great it would be if you stood up to the world, in front of all those microphones clustered around your house and said that what you did is wrong, that it is not the way to be a real man. It does not bestow bravery or honor on anyone to murder an animal like Cecil and put his head up on your living room wall. Nor can we justify doing it to you.
Frankenstein was a cautionary tale for us, more timely all of the time. If I cannot inspire love, the monster tells his creator, then I will inspire fear. And hate. Both are the inspirations and the awful spawn of the mob. If we cannot practice the love, we will of necessity indulge the other. Just look at cable news or the pronouncements of our so-called political leaders.
Dr. Palmer, I have no respect for your twisted ideas about what it means to be a man, but you do have the sympathy of this living being for what you are going through. Real men show compassion. Real men speak up for the love and decency in people. Real men nurture and protect, they do not kill or maim for glory.
Every wise man or woman in history warns us to be careful about judging others.
“Deserve it!, I dare say he does,” wrote J.R.R. Tolkien in The Fellowship Of The Rings. “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”
That, for me, is the message of the horses, heard and understood for centuries by Native Peoples all over the world. They call us to come together and live in harmony or perish together in the bleeding world.
I should say – it should be obvious, but is not not to some – that it is good and healthy thing to condemn the brutal killing of Cecil, and to demand that this horrific practice of trophy hunting be abolished. That is perhaps the silver lining in this awful cloud. But that is not what so many of the messages are about. The greedy media, of course, is happy to bring us every morsel of this awful story, and of this man’s sad life. They will make a lot of money from Cecil and Dr. Palmer.
Facebook is an amoral medium, it will happily transmit any kind of message from one point to another, it is a corporate business without conscience, it connects us in one way, disconnects us in another. It makes righteousness free and easy for lazy and cowardly people. I think we all know by now, just how fickle this faux morality is. Mob outrage is as thin as is loud. By next week, the media will have moved on, the mob will have found someone else to shame, the trophy hunters will sneak around and buy their courage in some quiet and indirect way. The animals will suffer and die.
The elephants and the ponies and the carriage horses have taught us that many people invoke their love of animals and decry their mistreatment and abuse, but rarely stick around long enough to see that they survive in our every day lives and remain with us, or have secure places to go. Like poor Cecil, they are doomed to being killed and sacrificed so that they might be saved.
The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering and anger and cruelty and violence is to forgive. Plato cautioned us to be kind, for everyone we meet is fighting a harder battle.
