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Serious Thumper
   
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Savage heart of darkness
Posts: 680
Cartersville, GA
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In nature, there are no entitlements; either prepaid or handed down! You forage and compete for resources just like every other animal, and take your chances.
[I can just hear the tea-baggers now... Oh yeah, that's what I wanted to hear! I want to quit paying taxes and let folks fend for themselves. Of course, the TBs have their own short term agenda, and now that they've had some measure of success (on the backs of others, BTW), they want to keep the spoils and not pay forward.]
With animals, if you get sick, injured, or nabbed by a set of powerful fangs, then you drew the low card - no one to blame, all in the game (hey, poetry!). There may be brief sorrow in passing, but it's no different than the next moment when you find a new grassy hillside, and life becomes better. Life is rife with ebb and flow. I'm always amazed that animals seem to be able to keep this constant straight in their mind. There is no pity, no vengeance - it's just a part of life!
Man is different than other animals, or at least purports to be, because there is a feeling called compassion. If you see someone old, sick, injured, or helpless, you either empathize... "what if that was me?", or sympathize... "I feel sorry for that person". These feelings compel us to help, and that's different from animal world.
There are psychologists who claim that this inability to let nature take its course is our weakness and will be our demise. That is, because we support folks who are unable to "pull their weight" for the good of the whole, they present a "drag" on the natural system that nature, already so finely tuned, cannot tolerate. Sure, find and cut the cheaters, the ripoffs, deceit, and predators out of the system, those are not the "need" we are talking about. The honest suffering, to me, is the real question about our society, and whether we are willing to support them?
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