Semper Fido

A US Marine gleefully tosses a puppy into a ravine in Iraq – apparently to its death (ABC News). That’s pretty bad. The fact that he was stupid enough to post the video on YouTube isn’t much better. I mean what was this dipshit thinking??? Oh wait, never mind, he wasn’t thinking. We don’t train our military to think, do we? No, and especially for Marines, we train them to kill. The worse part about this whole “puppy tossing” incident is that I believe it’s going to become huge. There are already a bunch of people declaring war on this guy … “war”, on a “guy” for allegedly killing a “dog”…

Now don’t get me wrong here – it’s horrible what this guy allegedly (the conspiracy theorists are already at work with the “possible fraud” aspect of the video) did – killing an innocent puppy for the pure thrill of watching it die makes me think he could probably use some help taking care of his inner demons – but, I think that the unbridled outpouring of vengeance against him is, in many ways, far worse. He’s going to be feeling the wrath of society based on his own stupidity but I wonder if going after this one idiot is really that important. Shouldn’t we, as a society, be far more outraged about the reason this douche bag was even in Iraq? Or am I mistaken in thinking that the thousands (perhaps more – although I seriously doubt less…) of innocent human lives that have been lost be a bit more of a concern than one puppy?

This, of course, gets me to wondering exactly what level of life needs to exist for society to even begin considering its destruction a crime. I guess it all depends on the life form’s cuteness factor. See, that’s where this guy made a horrible mistake – he chose to take his aggression out on a cute animal. Cows, ducks, lambs, etc. are slaughtered daily for consumption; nobody even flinches when an insect is killed (on the contrary, it’s almost always viewed as a good thing) and don’t even get me started on plant life – we all love our beautifully manicured lawns… Heck, even humans (from what I’m told – the highest forms of life on this planet) are seen as disposable if their belief system doesn’t mesh with what society (or at least the part of society that believes it’s in control) has decided is right. But somehow the act of killing a cute little puppy has the power to offend far more than all the other deaths combined. I’m almost certain that there are even those out there that would like to see this evildoer put to death, himself, for such cruelty to a cute, innocent animal. Yeah, that would be considered apt punishment to some – the old “eye for an eye” adage taken to its usual level of insanity…

I don’t know … before you decide to jump on the bandwagon and even consider getting too upset over what this guy did, you might want to step back and view this thing from a broader perspective. Yeah, what he did would most definitely be considered extremely cruel to pretty much anybody in our society. Is it, however, much (if any) crueler than what he may need to do as standard duty over there? And I do realize that this, in no way, justifies what he did; however when young men (heck, pretty much children) are – for their first “professional” job – sent to fight a war, you’ve got to presume some noise. We need to understand that expecting these guys to all be able to cope with the situation smoothly just isn’t going to happen. Heck, often times initial careers chosen by civilians can prove to be more stressful than anticipated – there’s not much more stressful than war…

It’s a shame that it wasn’t an Iraqi soldier tossing this dog – this video could be used as PR for this war without a foreseeable finish line. Or wait; are we even fighting the Iraqi soldiers anymore? I don’t think so … from what I can gather it appears that the Iraqis are supposed to be on our side fighting somebody. Al-Qaeda? I don’t know. I guess we’re fighting that mystical creature known as “terrorism” together. It’s rather a shame that the Iraqis didn’t really need to concern themselves with this anti-western terrorism until we turned their country into a haven for it … but I digress… Wouldn’t it have been great to see one of those stereotypically clad terrorists tossing that poor puppy to its death? Yeah, that would give us yet another aphorism that we could wrongly place on our already mangled understanding of the Middle Eastern culture. Unfortunately though, it was an American. I think that’s the main reason that it is so upsetting … Americans are supposed to be the good guys … right…?

bis später,

Coriolis