"He Shot the Sheriff"

Still spending quiet moments reflecting on the assassination of Samuel the Squirrel. Reread an article that I've kept on Good Deaths by William T. Vollmann in Harper's ... maybe 2010. So much of the news, these days, is occupied with the Police's Just Kills and the Black Lives Matter movement that was birthed in the aftermath of St. Louis and Cleveland and Cincinnati and South Carolina and the murder in Florida. And, of course, of killings of police officers that is too common, as well. I know the accepted practice in Black Lives Matter is not to say that All Lives Matter, for me they do. Even Samuel's death matters to me.

Someone in the writing of the Sages of the Babylonian Exile, there is the comment that:

Show me a person who won't kill a spider and I'll show you a murderer.

Anna Freud in her work on Normal Development in Children argued, indeed, that Vegetarians are covering up their murderous impulses. I remember 40 years ago, doing a profile for a post=professional class on one of my kids ... a seven year old Vegetarian. Anna Freud's comment didn't do it for me -- at least, not completely. 

In my faith tradition, on the holiest day of the year, we read the book of Jonah during the very lengthy service and while we are not eating food or drinking liquids. Jonah had been asked by his God to travel to Mosul (Nineveh) to help those people to whom he was not related to atone for their sins. Not wanting it to look bad for his own sinning People (if the Ninevites mended their ways), Jonah hightailed it outa town heading towards another city. The childrens' part of the story follows with a Big Storm and a Big Fish that swallowed him and then vomited him up near where his God wanted him to be.

Jonah sits outside Nineveh in the oppressive heat and gets bummed out. God grows a gourd over his head to keep him cool. That night God sends a hot wind and a worm to destroy the story. Then the adult part of the story comes:

God: Jonah, you depressed?

Jonah: I'm fucking depressed.

God: Lookie here, Jo. You're depressed over the loss of a Kikayon (gourd) 

that you put no work into creating and 

I shouldn't be sorrowed 

over the thousands of my human and bovine creations within the City?

Three or more times a day, Jews recite the Credo: 

שמע ישראל הי אלוקינו הי אחד ... 

Listen up, Israel, God is your God ... God is One.

But it's in the second paragraph that follows in which God opines that:

I will give grasses to your cattle in the field an (only then) will you eat and be satisfied.

No taking care of yourself till the non-human creations are provided for.

I have great admiration for 4 of my next-generationals and 5 of my third-generationals who are Vegetarians ... or, maybe, as one who is well entrenched in the Last Quarter, I identify with the vulnerable and those who die unnecessarily.

I feel like saying a prayer for Samuel the Squirrel ... who lived as the best squirrel he* could be.

* ... Note that I apparently can't allow for the possibility that Sammy was Samantha.