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Can’t I Just Enjoy the Zoo Anymore?
I traveled last week to Washington DC with my daughter and her three children. This trip had been in the works for several years. It was planned as the “Grandma Camp” for this summer. (Usually, the kids come to our house here in the desert for a week and we swim, do fun things, and stay up late watching movies.) However, I decided about four years ago that we’d go to the nation’s capital when they were old enough to understand and enjoy it. I saved up to pay for the trip; my daughter bought her own plane ticket. It was delightful…exhausting, but delightful.
One of our destinations was the National Zoo. It is a smaller zoo but had some fine exhibits, and we got to see a baby gorilla — so darling! But, I began to feel annoyed as I moved from section to section.
Every time I’d read the information about the animal displayed, it focused on how us horrible humans were endangering this beast. Every. Single. Animal. Seriously.
At first, I thought: Well, it’s possible that this Sumatran tiger could be endangered; after all, it kills and eats humans. I’d probably kill any of them that I saw if I lived near it. But, it was a theme in that zoo. Each and every exhibit featured how its natural environment was being altered by people, resulting in the endangerment of the animal on display. Okay, maybe the ants that the anteaters consumed weren’t affected.
I began to feel annoyed and pestered. It wasn’t just the National Zoo–it was the National Guilt Exhibit. The apparent goal was to make you feel so bad that you were a human, and lived on the earth screwing it up for the animals.
Now, my understanding of my place in the whole ecosystem is to “take care of this place.” And that the earth was created for us, the humans, to come and live. That was the whole point of the earth’s creation. The beasts, the fish in the sea, the birds in the air, every herb, and fruit, and plant was created for the humans to care for and use.
I learned this, of course, from reading the Bible, listening to my parents’ teachings, and in church. Our family depended on the earth to provide our sustenance; we were farmers. We bought very little food from the grocery store. Therefore, I knew all about caring for the earth, tending to the animals, using the resources wisely.
I also recognize that there have certainly been instances of dreadful misuse of the earth’s resources in some areas; and undoubtedly there are still some places that aren’t being cared for as we are instructed to in the scriptures.
But, I’m not sure when the purpose of a zoo became to guilt-trip all the people who come to visit. Have you experienced this ever? I took my children to the San Diego Zoo regularly when they were small and we lived there between 1974-1986. We’d buy a yearly membership (with grandma’s Christmas money) so that we could just pop in for a short visit when we were in that part of town. We’d go see just the snakes, or just the elephants, or just the monkeys. With a large group of small children, that was the best way to go. Plus, it was located very near to the Navy hospital where we were frequent flyers with the pediatric department. We loved it!
So, has the purpose of a zoo changed since I last frequented a zoo regularly? Are they now just another way to be flogged for being a human, and screwing up Mother Gaia by breathing the air, and daring to live in a house, and driving a car?
Published in General
Some of them. Depends on the zoo.
Yes. These are also the same people running our schools and everything else.
And people wonder why so many millennials are lost.
Nice post, Cow Girl. One of the great things about it is that it’s not, at least in theory, a divisive concern: i don’t know many white, Black, Latino, or Asian people who feel like human beings are this hideous scar on the planet, I really don’t. Yet so many formerly reliably worthwhile museums, theaters, library lecture halls, even planetariums, top line organizations in public life are so full of the attitude you describe that it’s weakened, maybe crippled the ability of many elite institutions to count for much longer on their prestige in a nation they’ve rejected that’s rejecting them. They made a bet. Give them that. They looked at the situation and coolly decided we’d lose and there’d be no costs whatsoever to them.
Way back, a long time ago, 1999, this was heard in Congress
I prefer to receive my preaching in church. I don’t need it from the government.
This reminds me of going to the Baltimore aquarium with my husband. We were standing together, raptly watching enormous fish swim lazily around the gigantic fishtank…how beautiful! How varied! How fascinating… how delicious?
My husband admitted he was thinking about all the ways he could cook ’em…
Was it OK for a friend to kill an 18-inch “baby” copperhead snake?
When I was in elementary school in the ’80s, there was a big presentation about rain forests and how “we” are destroying them all. Acid rain was another fad back then.
Two generations were raised that way. The first is voting.
Couple years back I went to an Imax with my mother. Saw the presentation on coral reefs. It had all the colors and such you’d expect, but also a double helping of guilt trip. Guess their usual guest list comes in on field trips.
In John Ringo’s Monster Hunter novels one of the characters is a Cajun. Whenever a giant alligator monster attacks New Orleans her inevitable response is “That thing’ll make a fine gumbo”.
It’s their own guilt on display. They need to justify why THEY are keeping animals outside their natural habitat so that YOU won’t challenge them about their (mis)treatment.
Preemptive virtue signaling and gaslighting.
The whole “awareness” promotion has invaded our consciousnesses and we are now beyond saturation. It’s actually having a negative effect.
While I was waiting at the barbershop for my haircut, I picked up a National Geographic for the first time in a gazillion years. It was almost as you described. Every article on a particular animal, plant, or habitat mentioned how it was threatened by man. Even articles on certain peoples touched on how “evil” modern influences were destroying their way of life (e.g. making it better).
The Smithsonian’s magazine has become the same sort of guilt-trip scold. I’m cancelling it.
Yes. This is what happens when the Left is ascendant. No one is allowed to enjoy anything. It’s constant haranguing and scolding. I guess they’ve never heard that “Satan” means “Accuser.”
The Left is morally inverted, spreading misery to whatever it touches.
The idea that humans are “screwing up Mother Gaia” isn’t particularly new. What is new is the switch in emphasis. As I recall, Environmentalism used to be about humans taking action to restore and preserve nature. Now, it seems much darker. That no human action is good. That what is required is for humans to retreat, step back, remove ourselves from nature. The Agent Smith rant in the Matrix about how humans are a virus is perhaps the most in-your-face statement of this philosophy. But it’s more than just a movie line. The “De-Growth Movement” in economics is one real world example. Or take environmentalist, futurist James Lovelock…father of the Gaia theory. Consider this from a review of Lovelock’s book -The Vanishing face of Gaia – in The Guardian
The City Council on the People’s Republic of Berkeley CA just this week adopted a proposal calling for (among other Leftist wet dreams) humane population reduction to sustainable levels.
So, no, you can’t just go to the zoo anymore.
Sick. I know women under 40 who’ve decided never to have children because of this crap. I want to ask them, “Just who are you saving the world for???”, but I dare not. Their whole lives are a sacrifice on the lefty-enviro altar — career choices and everything.
I agree.
That’s one sweet way to reduce their tax base . . .
Idiots.
We subscribed to both National Geographic and Smithsonian for decades. Our children (and both of us…) are voracious readers, and every copy got read thoroughly. Sometime ago, I dropped both subscriptions because they turned into obnoxious rants against humanity.
It is ironic, no, that the very things that give us our (really, really) nice lives, are the things that are called “destroying” a way of life. Don’t you think that the little bent-over woman carrying the huge pile of sticks on her back would LOVE to have a gas cooking stove??
It’s basically political correctness in the science world. It’s the same reason that I have mostly given up on watching science documentaries, which used to be a great pleasure of mine. If it’s about quantum physics or astronomy, maybe it’ll be OK; but basically any other kind of science documentary will find some way to work in the eco-guilt angle.
Check your human privilege.
See, it is this attitude that shows me that some people are just deluded! Earth was created for us to live here–we are commanded to care for it. I, too, remember when Environmentalism was about humans taking action to restore and preserve. Now it seems definitely to be about removing and restricting humans from even being on earth.
I teach elementary school–I carefully indoctrinate my classes each year with my understanding: humans are part of this place–let’s take good care of it.
It seems you can’t do anything anymore without having this kind of PC experience at some level. We and, more disconcertingly, our children, are constantly being abused by the PC police. I wonder if this idiocy has something to do with the uptick in suicides. I wonder.
That’s a fair question. It seems reasonable that if people are subjected to the “you are a blight on Mother Earth” for long enough, sooner or later someone is going to take that argument to heart and act on the logical conclusion.
Perhaps not the noble denizens of the P.R. Berkeley, however?
Heavens no. They have proslytizing to do and a planet to save. Gaia needs them. This is a situation where they are happy to lead from behind.
I like the photos of women carrying water jugs on their heads. We take little things for granted:
Flip a switch, instant light.
Flush a toilet, goodbye caca!
Turn a faucet, fill a glass with drinking water.
Pull a lever, take a shower.
If you remove all the words after the commas above, then replace them with “destroy the planet”, you’ll get the left’s mindset on what it thinks about mankind. If they had their way, we’d all (except for their elites) be picking up sticks and carrying water on our heads . . .
If you’re ever in the Fresno/Yosemite area, visit Project Survival’s Cat Haven founded by my brother, Dale Anderson. Yes, there as you view the lions, tigers, leopards at very close range you will hear about the need to preserve the cats in the wild. But always with consideration of how to support the native people who live near the cats. My brother is a Christian and politically conservative, which has an impact on what is taught at the facility.