Hi everyone!
Welcome to my fifth blog post! In this post, I will talk about something the human race constantly struggles with: power.
Unfortunately, history and present-day provide many examples of humanity’s struggle for power for reasons of race, religion, gender, learning style, and love. Yet underneath all those reasons lies the main reason: fear of losing control and from that, a fear of the unknown.
In a commercialized society, the desire for power/control becomes even more defined. Non-human animals are an easy target because unlike humans, they can’t fight back as easily. We dominate them in many ways with cages, testing dangerous chemicals on them, and making them fight for entertainment, and we fear animals such as cats because they’re “unpredictable”, and they don’t “obey” like dogs.
We use the term animal as a negative term to call a human, and the word for a female, mother dog as a derogatory term towards women. (While this term has been sometimes redefined in another connotation of cool/sassy, it still has a negative impact on many and should be used only after a fair bit of contemplation of its necessity.) This provides a double negative for both humans and animals, and unfortunately, these terms are used constantly in daily life.
Animals, religion, race, love, gender, learning styles—they’re all connected by the fear of our differences. We have a long way to go, but in order to take the first step, we must choose to listen, let go of some control, and perhaps the unknown will instead become known.