Benazir and Tatiana

The senseless killing continues. NPR continues to keep me up to date on the killing.

I'm not saying I'd rather not know; I'm just making an observation. Pointless killing continues unabated and my primary news source continues to keep me apprised.


It's another one of those "just the way it is" features of life in the 21st century.

I like to think it would be a good thing if other events and items of interest were regularly reported. Updates about the numbers of evacuated people and families returning to the Gulf Coast, for example, would be more useful and more beneficial to my mental health than hearing about a young man's shooting spree in a shopping center in Oklahoma.

Besides killing, though, what else occurs at about equal frequency that would be of interest to large numbers of listeners?


I'm sad and angry about the unnecessary killing of Tatiana, the tiger at the San Francisco Zoo. She was killed for behaving like a tiger--chasing a running mammal and eating it.

Earlier this week, I read a thought-provoking essay in The Sun entitled "Thought to Exist in the Wild: Awakening from the Nightmare of Zoos." (At least for now, you can access the entire piece through the link.) Zoos have seemed a bit strange or wrong to me for awhile--progressively moreso over the years--but this essay by Derrick Jensen really yanked the covers off to make plain at least a part of my discomfort.

Reports I read online today about the incident only serve to illustrate Jensen's points about Western culture's sense of superiority and separateness from "animals". SF Mayor Gavin Newsom's office said, ""Live animal attacks won't be tolerated in San Francisco, and the mayor expects immediate improvements in protocols and facilities so that tragedies such as this never happen again. It's simply unacceptable."

I sent the mayor a digital copy of the Jensen essay but I read tonight that he's involved in a sex scandal so he may not have a chance to read it.

Tatiana
beautiful teacher