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Model Behavior
Wednesday February 15, 2006
Our dog Phoebe has no traffic sense at
all. Like all Irish Setters, she firmly believes that all human beings are kind,
generous, and would just love to pat her head and rub her long silky ears.
Most of the time, she's right.
By extension, though, she also believes that everything associated with
humans must be equally safe. So she saunters out into an intersection as
casually as a shopper entering a mall, sublimely confident that nothing is going
to hurt her.
I sometimes think that we could learn a lot from dogs. From friendly
dogs, certainly. And probably from horses. Maybe even from some cats.
In church, for example, most of us recite the Lord's Prayer: “Your will
be done, on earth…” If God's will is to have everyone get along harmoniously,
we'd have a hard time finding a better example to emulate than Phoebe.
She has never picked a fight with anything. Not even when a visiting dog
curls up in her favourite bed or eats from her bowl. She never holds a grudge.
Even in pain, she has never nipped or snapped at us.
Some inhumane humans
Unfortunately, Phoebe
lacks the smarts to recognize that the world is not always kindly.
I think she's right about people, in general. Sure, there are some
rotten apples in any barrel. In the animal world, they'd be the predators – the
wolf packs, the sabre-toothed tigers…. Or they'd be the carrion-eaters –
vultures and hyenas… Typically, they prey on the weakest and most vulnerable in
society – the bewildered elderly, the impressionable young, the mentally
challenged…
I know they exist. I'm not sure they qualify as human, though, certainly
not as humane.
They sell phony investment funds. They juggle accounts to cheat
shareholders and pension funds. They hustle drugs, they pimp for prostitutes,
they invade homes and beat up senior citizens. And they skim the cream off
political sponsorship programs.
But they're a minority. I have met very few people who wouldn't respond
warmly and compassionately to others, face to face.
Insatiable demands
But the industries,
corporations, and institutions that we create, are not as compassionate. They
care no more about their effects on individual humans than a Hummer cares about
a dog it just crushed. The driver may care -- three-tons of steel and rubber
doesn't.
As I have written before, an institution, any institution, is the
ultimate self-centred entity. It cares only about itself.
Those are harsh words, I know. Show me one institution, one
organization, one corporation, that has voluntarily sacrificed itself so that
its competitors can survive, and I'll eat my words for supper.
Show me an army that chooses to lose. Show me a charity that decides
others can do the job better. Show me a government that resigns without being
forced out.
If there is such a thing as original sin, it wasn't eating an apple. The
sin was our decision to sacrifice God's world and our own better instincts to
the insatiable demands of our own creations.
Copyright © by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study
groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
To send comments on this column, email
Jim Taylor
directly. You can also receive Jim's column by email. Contact him at
jimt@quixotic.ca
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