The Conscious Predator

Because we are fascinated by your mysterious, elusive existence, we want to find you; find out more about you; get close to you; feel the way you feel inside. So we hunt you down. We track you with radio collars. We follow your every movement. We harpoon you. Buy, sell, eat and savor your flesh. We take photographs of you and frame them. We capture you, cage you, train you, feed you, play with you, manipulate your behavior to bring you into our realm of understanding. We put you on our schedules. We put you behind bars. Behind walls. Behind thick glass. We find your natural environment stunning, so we go there. We drive our cars, ride in our boats, gun our engines, sputter our smoke, ring our bells, dive in, stir up silt, grab on for dear life. We find your perfection so desirable, we envy you. We want it for ourselves; we want to be you. We want you to know our entrapment, so we trap you. We trick you, ensnare you, take you away from your world, and bring you into ours. We are obsessed with you, and our obsessions are perversions that haunt you. We are so in awe of you that we are afraid of you. We are afraid really of who we are; and who we are not and can never be. So we resent you and want you to feel our pain and grief. So we kill you. We mass murder your kinds until you go extinct. And still, we keep killing. We are ashamed of ourselves; our guilt weighs on us so heavily that it crushes us. So to get out from under it we try and ignore it. To ignore it we have to pretend it is not there. And in so doing, we deny a force that will not be denied its power. Its power makes itself known with or without our permission or admittance of it. So with the power of guilt, which rises up backed by its own need to be heard, in a tone not unlike rage, we hurt you ever more. We know we should leave you alone, let you be. But we don’t want to let you be because we need you; and letting you be means letting you go. We don’t want to let you go, because we want you to need us. We want you to be dependent upon us, so we make ourselves your masters; we turn you into slaves, so that your life becomes necessarily about performing for us so that we will feed you. We give you no choice, then claim that because you don’t make choices the way that we do, (with moral consideration?), or at all (so we have ourselves convinced), then it doesn’t matter what we take from you. Our guilt leads us also to justify our actions to ourselves. If we didn’t, our guilt would swallow us whole and eat us alive. We tell ourselves that what you really want is the safety of captivity. Or worse still, that you don’t have wants, or if you do, you don’t understand what they are, so they are obsolete. We have convinced ourselves that what we’ve done to you – what we do to you – is okay; by believing that because you are not like us, you are merely our property. We know so deeply within that your precious lives are priceless. So we put prices on your heads to appease the insatiable hunger of our guilt. We love you to the point of worship. Because your innocence is precisely that for which our sinful souls strive. For our consciences to be clean, we would have to be other than human. This is what makes us want to become you. We want the escape into mindless enlightenment. We wish that through only righteous choice, we could be pure. Pure like you are without needing to choose it. Pure by nature. We long for the days of our infancy, as both a species and as individuals, before we had to decide to be good, but just simply were. Truly...so truly...we love you. And because we love you, we are sorry...so sorry. We are so deeply remorseful it makes us die inside. We are so ashamed that we put ourselves into cages in our minds as punishment. We whip ourselves for self-control. We force ourselves to do tricks for rewards. It’s the only way we feel we deserve them. Out of self-pity, then, we watch ourselves stagnate and sleep our days away. Our despair causes the loss of our hope. But hopefully...hopefully we can turn our guilt into motivation. Ideally we will use the tools of remorse to build the vehicle for action. Hopefully we can utilize our anger as fuel, and fight with our lives for freedom! Maybe, just maybe, if we can forgive ourselves, thereby unlocking the cage doors in our minds, we won’t take freedom for granted anymore. And equipped with the empowerment of our newfound appreciation, for who you are and who we are too, (as extensions of you), we will realize that to have means not to hold. That to hold means to let go. That to live means to let live; to be means to let be. And most importantly, we shall learn that to love you ...as in the way God Almighty intends for us to love you...means to set you free.