This story is a few days old now and the outrage it has caused is huge.
It has bothered me since I first read about it, but my outrage is not because of the dog which in other cultures is a food item and would be added to a pot of boiling oil without a second thought.
My thoughts are of the thousands of human babies, toddlars jueveniles who have been dispatched by artillary, airstrike or snippers cluster bomblets left to maim and kill, land mines phospher bombs and a hundred other poisons and chemical agents used to eradicate the enemies.
We understand the act to be cavalier cruelty a senceless act of death and it angers us. Why the outpouring of indignation for a puppy and not for the infants who died in Gaza this week. Well I think it's because it's safe to condemn the puppies trearment, it's safe to identify with the puppy, it requires no deeper understanding of the context. The same level of condemnation directed at the IDF or coalition forces who have killed scores of babies in the last month alone requires that we acknowledge and identify the perpatrators as a group or nationals while the heartless marine is an individual and the connection with the wider group can be easily severed into the singular act of one sick individual. So all of us feel safe condemning this act unreservedly while we may not feel safe condemning a pilot who has just dropped a bomb in some village killing women and children. We have to an alarming extent become hardened to the death of human beings, but we still need the emotional release of indignation, the dog provides release of pent up anger, safely, with no wider reaching connection, it is isolated and therefore safe to vent about. We can comfortably weep for the dog where we cannot for the dead Iraqis or the dead Afghans, they are only collateral damage the dog is somehow a bonified innocent victim in our eyes.
We spend billions on pets every year in the western world and we use them badly in many cases. What this marine did was just one cruel act among millions but it has commanded and concentrated the thoughts of millions on the dog and not on the human victims of war.
Last week on CNN they ran spots of returning service personell from Iraq who had shipped rescued puppies home from the war zone at a cost of thousands of dollars per dog while they were rescued from a country where stravation and premature death from disease and war are a dayly occurance. There is something deeply wrong with acts like that and I can't help thinking that memorials and shrines and donations,perhaps a ribbon campaigne will be devoted to this little animal while the human victims will be villified as the enemy.
I mean no disrespect to anyone who feels for the puppy as is considered normal, that was not my intention.