"Two Wolves and a Sheep"

The phrase was penned by James Bovard, writing in the Sacramento Bee:
"Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to
have for dinner".

It seems that not only democracy can be voracious but the entire human
species. Scientists tell us that there may be as many as 40 million species still
alive on the planet. But apparently there were 5 to 50 billion previously, which
translates to a 99.9% failure rate. Some researchers go so far as to say that we
are in the midst of a "mass extinction of living things", posing a threat to the
survival of the human species in the next century. According to the American
Museum of Natural History, the current extinction rate is the fastest in the 4.5
billion year history of the planet. More to the point, these extinctions are
occurring as a result of man's activities and not natural events.

There are some positive phenomena around. Scientists claim to have found a
"Lost World" deep in the jungles of Indonesia, with new species of birds,
butterflies, frogs and plants. There is also a relatively new theory of
Transpermia, which holds that all life on planets was originally seeded by
asteroid impacts. Explosions of comets and meteorites, like the one that destroyed
the dinosaurs, might have seeded enough organic material to reach Titan, Saturn's
moon. The timing is a bit problematic: perhaps some six hundred million fragments
from such an explosion could have left the earth and orbited around the sun. Some
of them might even have had enough propulsion to reach Saturn and Jupiter although
it would take roughly one million years of space travel to get there. Titan is
apparently laden with organic materials from which life could spring. Titan's
freezing temperatures, however, provide an inhospitable environment for seeds to
flourish.

A million years of travel? 50 billion species? I'm not sure my onboard

computer can handle those numbers. But I can see dangers closer to home. Did you
know that recently a family of five was beheaded in India for the crime of
witchcraft? Did you know that New York City was built by slaves, and that
Charleston, South Carolina, is the only city in the United States to have had more
slaves than New York? Or that mathematicians were once considered traitors?
According to Howard S. Gardner, discussing the Theory of Multiple Intelligences,
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/gardner.htm "In the Spanish Inquisition one could
receive life imprisonment or even a death sentence if one possessed Arab
manuscripts dealing with mathematics. 'Mathematicians were denounced as the
greatest of all heretics.'"

We're not very benevolent creatures, are we? We destroy our own kind as
rapidly as we exterminate others. We are just now learning about the "Black Room"
at Baghdad International Airport. According to the New York Times, an elite force
of roughly 1000 converted one of Saddam Hussein's military centers into an
interrogation room where prisoners were abused and tortured. While we marvel at
the beauty of Saturn's rings we are busy battling each other to prove whose
religion, whose race, whose ancestry, whose toothpaste, is superior. And we are
ignoring what has been happening right here on earth, in America, to the Bill of
Rights, which, under the previous
administration, was fast becoming an endangered species itself.

Aren't there better uses for human energy? Can't we find better leaders? Are
we victims of what Bovard calls "Battered Citizen Syndrome"?

The only certainty is that a society composed of two wolves and a sheep cannot
hope to survive for very long.
 c. Corinne Whitaker 2006 http://www.giraffe.com