Luco on the Election

Maybe you wonder where I have been, maybe you do not wonder; maybe you rightly assume that tiny-dog-pancakes are enough to keep a cat from the Internet, from writing, from any sort of cheer.

Although that is not entirely true. Actually, today I am happy. I will give you a moment to absorb that statement.

Would you like to know why? Shall I tell you what has lifted my obliterated heart?

The source of my joy, friends, is the election results of this 2012.

There was so much vitriol - and I know you do not need a cat to tell you this - but it soured my days. Each political flyer a kind of poison in my mouth, against my tongue, tasting of copper and desperation.

"So and so eats babies each morning." "So and so will kill your beloved granddaddy." "So and so will burn down your house with a fire made from the money they are saving on taxes." "So and so has been living in your attic for 15 consecutive years and has been collecting welfare for 20; they have listed you as a dependent and are slowly siphoning your blood as you sleep."

It is lucky for me that the prison guard does not view the television, because I believe adding volume and moving pictures to these political advertisements would have caused me to sneak my head in between the door and its frame as the door was being swung shut behind those monstrous beasts, the dogs.

 

But I am heartened. This country within which I am a prisoner, little more than a feline slave with no say in political decisions anyway, has decided to value reason and decency over totalitarianism and bigotry. The little blue sign in the prison guard's lawn a beacon to like minded neighbors who waved, smiled, nodded their heads at the awful little dogs on their awful little dog walks.

Happy is a strange feeling.

A feeling like maybe there are possibilities I had not before considered. 

Possibilities I had not before considered that I am considering now considering (I care not that you must wade through my convoluted syntax, no one is forcing you, reader, to slog through this - I have no gun, literal or metaphorical to your head, unless your shock at my contentedness is itself rather like a kind of violence - something so startling you are compelled to pay attention): Perhaps all living creatures are capable of mercy, perhaps money does not have so final a power of perversion, perhaps there are more who favor compassion than I had thought, perhaps each moment is a chance for redemption.

These, friends, are thoughts revolutionary. You and I have been together on a journey, and finally, perhaps, this is my landing place (at least for now?).

 

Perhaps my landing place is one that includes room for hope.

Although I still feel tremors of alienation in my belly, still feel intrinsically separate from the other animals, still feel trapped against my will in a prison not of my own choosing.

But maybe it is through negotiating these ambivalencies that I will create within myself greater understanding, greater compassion, greater connection to that which is necessary and good.

What I mean to say is, I realize today that the world is a complicated place, and creatures are capable of both unimaginable cruelties and incomprehensible kindnesses. We are all of the both created; we contain within us that which is contained in stars.

Is it, therefore, a surprise that we so brightly burn?