So I saw this cartoon once wherein a young boy asks his grandfather if he was ever one of those people who owned 'animal slaves.'
Grandpa starts ranting, as grandpas are wont to do: "They weren't slaves, they were pets! They were lucky to be pets!"
Got me thinking: What do I do on a daily basis that future generations will consider monstrous?
For starters, I'm a big fan of meat and the eating thereof. The universe, loving a good practical joke, has decided that it would be a good idea to make my friends vegetarians and vegans.
My roommate will often enter the kitchen: "What are you cooking?"
Bacon and eggs.
"I hate you," he'll say.
But you're not supposed to like to eat meat, people tell us. Meat is murder! Dairy is rape! Go veg!
I don't know about that. I don't know if comparing sexual assault to cheese is a great idea.
The best way to overcome this, I think, has been laid out for us in the pages of science-fiction. In Douglas Adams'
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, we're introduced to a cow that's been bred to want to be eaten:
'Are you going to tell me,' said Arthur, 'that I shouldn't have
green salad?'
'Well,' said the animal, 'I know many vegetables that are
very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually
decided to cut through the whoile tangled problem and breed
an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of
saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am.'Arthur's dinner party orders four steaks:
'I'll just nip off and shoot myself.'
He turned and gave a friendly wink to Arthur.
'Don't worry, sir,' he said, 'I'll be very humane.'
It waddled unhurriedly off to the kitchen.Scientists of the world, take note: I don't care about the flying car. I want a cow that begs me to eat it.
Or consider the humble playground.
European safety standards are being used to update playgrounds in Malta to keep them "safe."
I don't buy it.
When I was a little kid, our playgrounds were made out of wooden beams and steel poles on top of gravel. And we liked it!
Dr, Chris Said, of the Maltese Parliament, said,
“Many accidents are unavoidable because of the way children play. Children need some risk in their play to help them develop."
But what happens when some kid gets it into his head that because the new playground is made out of plastic and has a bouncy, spongey ground surface, it's now safe to go take a header off of the top of the monkeybars?
Then he'll split his head open and not understand why. If kids were still playing on blacktop, they'd understand that fun is inherently dangerous and not to be trusted.
Generations into the future, I can foresee my grandchildren looking at me like I'm the worst person on the planet for yelling at them to put down their XBox 1080s and go outside and play.
"The outside world is bad, grandpa! I could hurt myself!"
Perhaps, though, it's the way of the world. When my own grandfather would yell at me and my sister for watching cartoons instead of getting some fresh air, we didn't understand what he was talking about or why.
The weird thing about it is that for all the yelling and teeth-gnashing that people do about violence on tv, sex in the movies and, of course, rap music, it's probably stuff that we take for granted that will color us as inhuman savages to the world in the future.
Why did they drive CARS? My God! You mean to tell me they actually ate sugar?!
Which is why my usual approach is to just not care. I have no real way of knowing if my love of medium-rare steaks will put me alongside Mussolini in the eyes of posterity. So why spend energy worrying about it?
