We have a cat named Hudson who killed off a litter last month. She had a litter in the spring and enjoyed herself immensely. When the second litter came in the fall, she refused to care for it at all. Often animal mothers and human mothers who refuse care know exactly what they are doing. They are acknowledging their own limitation. It is, as regular people often say, "for the best."While not arguing for virtue in infanticide, I have to argue at least the plausibility of withdrawing maternal care. Pushing your children into a lake is hardly that. But Susan Smith was making an announcement: she couldn't care for her children. Instead of making their lives permanently miserable, she drowned them. There is a strange, cruel mercy in the act.
...and this is Harold Kulungian, commenting on one of Rev. Shaper's previous columns:
The notions put forward by Rev. Donna Shaper in the Sept. 16 Bulletin that "We must make our own burgers" bemused me. What is the difference in the contents, and the effects, of burgers that we make at home vs. the famous Big Mac? I can't imagine it is very much.
Yet Schaper finds some sort of philosophical consolation in the "do-it-yourself" independent approach to burgers....
Let's take just a couple of recent celebrity cases, to observe the effect of the Big Mac Way of Life in America.
When Lorena Bobbitt was on trial last spring for cutting off her husband's penis, you could see in her some symptoms that are actually widespread in our society. In one of her photos, her face was so tense that her eyes were virtually popping out of her head. You could see the whites of her eyes both above and below the iris. The enormous pressure behind her eyes, causing them to protrude so much, is coming from dietary excess, and shows her whole nervous system to be under immense strain.
Lorena's carnivorous diet made her very excitable, sexually aggressive, and regularly drove her to anger. Anger is coming from the overburdened liver and spleen, making one bilious and splenetic.
Lorena's favorite food, indicated when she was released from her 45-day psychiatric surveillance, in answer to a reporter's question "What are you going to do now that you are free, Lorena?" "The first place I'm going is to McDonald's..." she exclaimed joyfully...
And no one better exemplifies this new dietary behavioral syndrome than O.J. Simpson. Simpson had just gone to McDonald's for a Big Mac an hour or two before the murders took place.
