Sunday, January 25, 2009

The atrocities of man... When will we open our eyes?

I received an email from a good friend regarding Pilot Whale slaughters in the Faoroe Islands near Denmark.

http://www.globalsurfnews.com/news.asp?Id_news=37675

In my humble opinion there are too many things like this going on in our fragile world. Atrocities against man are one thing, but pointless and barbaric destruction of life on our planet for the sake of tradition is so completely unacceptable, I can't even fathom what could possibly be going through the minds of these people. They claim the animals are killed for food, yet they have an abundance of food in their country.

After reading the article linked above, I realized that these people are completely out-of-touch with what is going on around our world. They are brought up by their parents to accept this "tradition" as a great event that they can one day participate in when they are old enough. It becomes something for them to look forward to each year, and a right of passage for them to make the transition from a boy to a man.

How is it possible to change the attitude and beliefs of a people so set into their tradition? This reminds me of a show I saw on the National Geographic Channel where a journalist interviewed a bunch of children in Afghanistan. These kids were 8 years old and carrying loaded, fully automatic rifles and they were chanting statements of hatred towards the United States. The journalist asked the kids if they knew what the US was and where it was and they said no. They said their parents taught them about how they must hate these evil people from this country called the US and they must learn how to kill them.

No government action or force of any kind is going to change the way these people think and their beliefs. Ultimately it will take a small group of open-minded individuals within these people to slowly turn things around. It will take a very long time, and as we have seen with prejudice and bigotry in North America it will never be completely gone because there will always be someones parent or grandparent that still holds onto those beliefs.

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