Chris Banyas
Editor-in-Chief
I found myself facing a unique and singular experience earlier this year: a used bookstore and frequent haunt of mine over my collegiate experience near ISU closed and very shortly thereafter a tattoo shop popped up inside the abandoned hulk of a storefront.
It goes without saying that I have nothing whatsoever against tattoos, abandoned hulks, vape shops, Subway restaurants or most things in general, but I find it to be an interesting and relevant statement about the times we live in.
Indeed, certain questions must arise when one finds oneself living in a town where the most abundant forms of businesses represented include in no special order: tattoo shops, vape shops and Subway restaurants.
Businesses fail and succeed for myriad reasons, but to my eyes, the sign of the times is this: a dealer in dusty tomes, avenues to history, knowledge, entertainment and enlightenment, corporeal things unlike their digital counterparts, things which required a certain level of investment and patience to unlock were superseded by what all too frequently occur as ephemeral desires manifested as permanent skin designs.
Patience, desires, ephemeral, permanent: all words which might be related back to human gratification.
Spewing platitudes has never been my style. I find them to be trite, insulting and in the end ultimately unhelpful, but here it is: the stripe of instant gratification plaguing our society has never been more vibrant, and manifests itself in everything.
Take Sabrina Corgatelli and the social media explosion following her posting photos of downed animals from her hunting expedition to Africa.
As I understand the situation, she did nothing unlawful, and in actuality what she was doing ended up helping the game preserves to continue financially as a large portion of their operating costs come from this exact thing.
The vitriolic smear campaign that played out on Facebook and beyond was unlike anything I had ever seen up close before. The newspaper’s Facebook page was accosted by many of these anti-Corgatelli individuals mandating that WE (the newspaper??) take action and issuing remonstrations for allowing someone like her into our midst. We MUST, they said, call for her job.
Just because there is something called a keyboard, and this magical contraption is connected magically to a thing which the sages have handed down to us called the computer, doesn’t mean you should vomit the aberrations of your mind and feelings out into the world for everyone to see.
To see.
Society has turned in such a way as to make physical actions and pursuances obsolete. It is now all about what you can show people via Facebook or other social media, what they can see you doing, not about what you actually did, or more importantly, why you did it in the first place.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with an impassioned response to something that you hold dear to your heart: in this case the rights, feelings, pain and potential suffering of an animal.
I’ll tell you what I told my staff: if you find yourself feeling angry, bitter and generally frothing at the mouth, take that energy and use it to do something constructive.
Blowing up Facebook pages and demanding the job of someone you haven’t taken the time to step into the shoes of over something you haven’t deigned to investigate and flesh out all the sides of before posting something that is only done so that other people will SEE how you feel is typical of the time we live in.
The thrust of the action is not to change in a positive way, but to be as destructive as possible for the entire world to SEE, because as we all know: if it bleeds, it leads, and this case the thing it leads to is likes.
Furthermore, everyone who maybe felt like they were making strides toward change need to remember the immortal words of Cicero: Cui bono. Who benefits? In this scenario, from my vantage point, Corgatelli herself ONLY benefits from a social media explosion.
When I saw the picture of the downed giraffe, I had a very clear vision which helped me make sense of it all.
Maybe it will help you.
There seems to be a trend today of people viewing all animals as cuddly stuffed things, and all humans as somehow worth less than any animal to the point that you hear stories of mothers leaving a child to die in a hot car while they bring their beloved dog into the air conditioned interior of a Wal-Mart.
Animals, as people are living things: I think that sometimes people forget this and see them as Disneyesque caricatures.
Back to the giraffe.
Imagine it out there on the plain. He is old: A majestic behemoth striding arthritically to and fro. But he is bored. He has been bored for some time. The threats and dangers which have been present in the lives of his ancestors for generations immemorial have been “kindly” taken away by the human administrators.
Along comes the woman some would have you believe as the malefactor of the story. She hunts the giraffe. For the first time in a long time his heart begins to race, he feels alive, and before he dies in what I understand was an excessively humane manner, he connects with his ancestors as he feels what it is to be alive. To have lived.
If in the twilight of my years, I find myself in a nursing home, and I see the eyes of that giraffe looking back at me from the greasy mirror next to the bathroom door, I’d want someone to concoct a similar situation. Not to be hunted, but to reinvigorate my life one last time so that I might warm Charon’s ear with my tale of Earthly bodily destruction; something involving a one-way skydiving jump, illegal fireworks, booze, pirate costumes and an excessive amount of explosives.
If I had to choose to watch myself wither away or buy that ticket, I’m buying the ticket every time.
As the man said: “Buy the ticket, take the ride.”
I’d like to thank several past members of the Bengal staff for injecting some level of sanity and normalcy into the social media explosion. Your Atticus Finchian defiance of the mob warmed my heart. I love you guys. You know who you are.
