Sunday, September 6, 2009

THE NEED TO HUNT THE WOLF, CIRCA 2009

Evil in the world goes by many different incarnations. Satan, demonic spirits, psychotic behavior, your mother-in-law, the Yankees, whatever forms your fears allow it. If you're spiritual, you resist with incantations; if you're secular, you do it with refutations. Either way, you know you have a war on your hands....!

But how to fight what is mostly nameless and faceless? what is so deeply embedded in our evolved sub-consciousness, we can't quite articulate it, only sense it?

Philosophers, psychiatrists and Captain Ahab alike have each sensed their own icons of evil. So have the national parks in the West where this year they have renewed the right -- actually, the need -- to hunt the wolf. Like the shark and the serpent, the wolf has remained hidden inside our deepest chambers of fear, invincibly resistant to the knife of logic.

And so today, the hunt is on once again. Not only for the wolf, but for any wolf in sheep's clothing. No matter the wolf's actual instincts nor ideologies, no matter the authentic pros and cons of his place in the ecology. The quintessential here is simply the hunt.

In recent fly-overs by the park rangers, they have identified the "king of the wolves" out there as black! young! intent on establishing his will over the packs! One helicopter shot could bring him down. But the hunters' primal fear demands direct retribution on the ground. Where they can see the downed prey for themselves.

And so it is that there is an evil in the land. The wolf...? The hunters....? The rangers....? Right now, there's so much heat and so little light in those hills, it's not yet possible to say.

5 comments:

  1. "But how to fight what is mostly nameless and faceless? what is so deeply embedded in our evolved sub-consciousness, we can't quite articulate it, only sense it?"

    This sums it all up for me...not being sure of what I'm scared of, but I sense it, and that's enough to frighten the hell out of me.

    As for the wolves, I wonder if they are as scared of us as we are them, and the way they attack is "their" form of retribution.

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  2. Ahh yes, they are afraid of US as well!

    Actually, everyone has some "wolves" in our life whose terror we can't always put into words...but they have been hardwired into us throughout our life experience...the idea of personal growth always seems centered on getting in touch with those life experiences and rationally working our way through them... thus shedding our chains of terror...it can be done...not easily, but it can be done

    Of course then there's someone like Limbuagh and Beck -- they are perhaps the type who dont even WANT to outgrow their hatreds and angers... people like that won't admit it but they probably and sadly thrive on those emotions

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  3. The "Wolves fair game in Idaho" article appeared here. Eight decades ago the gray wolves were hunted to extinction. Now, just 8 months after being removed from federal endangered list, the hunt is back on. The photo was of a 34 year old holding the first wolf reported killed. He said, "It was really an adrenlaine rush to have those wolves all around me, howling and milling about after I fired the shot". I read an article once that stated that hunters stop hunting when they grow up, around the age of 45.

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  4. Jerry, I've never hunted so I can't be entirely fair-minded about this subject. One of the gentlest Catholic men I know loves to hunt and kill and mount prey of all kind. But the wolf -- along with the serpent and shark -- really does seem to stir the blood of many. Like you say,maybe less after they "grow up."

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  5. Right now there are too many wolves in our world.

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