Thursday, January 6, 2011

The World is Obsessed with Death


It's everywhere. You can't seem to go very far or do very much in this world without seeing or hearing about death. Death seems to be a popular subject throughout the world.

For example if you walk into a grocery store the first thing you see is a refrigerator or freezer filled with death. There are dead fish piled up high, dead shrimp, dead clams, dead crabs. In another section of the same store there are parts of muscles of dead animals. Pieces of animals' legs, chests, rumps, thighs, and even some entire bodies or heads of animals that are dead.

If you go to the cleaning products aisle there are products that that say that they kill 99.9% of germs. There are products that say they kill viruses, they kill pests like rats, mice, insects and the like.

There are stores totally devoted to killing that sell 'sporting' goods to kill anything and everything in any size. There are handguns, shotguns, bows and arrows, electical guns, poisons, traps, and other assorted killing equipment.

Most people will sit down to 'enjoy' a plate full of death. There are dead animals in most of their dishes as well as other assorted dead foods that have had their life forces destroyed by heat from cooking.

Everything that has been cooked or heated is dead and has very little value to the human body in that state. Few if any life forms will consume these dead products. Most carnivores will only eat a dead prey animal after it has recently been killed. They rarely will eat an animal that was already dead except in a situation where they are nearly starving to death themselves.

Of course there are a few exceptions such as vultures which survive off of the scraps of already dead animals but few species behave this way.

Why then are humans so obsessed with death? We have death sports like hunting and fishing where the primary objective is to kill another being for the purpose of sport and entertainment.

Most humans however do not and will not participate in the killing of their food. They prefer to have someone else do the dirty work and kill by proxy. They allow the butchers and slaughterhouse employees to do the killing for them. This is still killing but most people will never admit to being a killer.

Besides all of this there are dog fights that usually end in one or more of the dogs dying. Hundreds of people will pour into a basement or an outdoor ring to watch these dog fights and see violence and death.

Besides the dog fights are the chicken fights. People actually train chickens to peck each other to death when they meet another fight chicken. Eventhough these are illegal in most of the USA still there are many illegal chicken fights still in operation in most of the country.

In cultures such as the hispanic culture there are bullfights. These 'fights' are not really fights but an unecessary slaughter of a helpless bull. The bull fighter is equipped with swords and other lethal weapons but the bull is only equipped with it's natural defenses which are it's strength and it's horns. There is practically no chance of one of these bulls ever 'winning' one of these competitions. Still thousands or even millions of people attend these bloody events in the name of entertainment.

On the streets of Asia you can see the sales of sometimes live and often dead animals to be used for food or other possibly religious ceremonies.

Nearly every Hollywood movie is chock full of violence and death. There are vehicles blowing up, people being shot, stabbed, burned, hung, run over and killed in every new creative way possible.

When a convict is killed everyone wants to see the procedures in countries and states where the death penalty is still legal. The obituary pages of the newspapers of the world are some of the most popular pages of the newspaper. In fact my parents look at that section before they look at even the first page of the newspaper.

What is so exciting about death? Why don't we have a world that is obsessed with life? Why can't we all agree that life is the way to go and eliminate all of the death? Of course death is totally natural and is the end of life but we don't need to be so obsessed with it. In order to actually have a healthy and happy life, no death is ever needed, we can eat healthy and tasty food that totally comes from plants in their natural state. We can enjoy many sports that do not require another being to suffer or die. There is no need to present death as a glamorous way to entertain ourselves.

Death is not something to sensationalize, it is something we need to recognize but then move on and concentrate on life and the living. Does anyone disagree with this?