Our earth’s deepest river is the Congo, or the Congo-Kinshasa (previously known as Zaire). Although the Nile boasts as Africa’s longest river, The Congo earns second place and hosts such impressive depths that an eclectic variety of uniquely adapted and mysteriously marvelous fish species thrive there. Among them is the mondeli bureau. Mondeli Bureau translates to ‘white man in an office.’ It is a stunted and fragile fish, lacking eyes and pigment, a being who dies easily from the bends when brought up and out of the denizens of its own comfortable, dark holes at the bottom of the raging water.
I don’t need to call out the elephant in the room on this one.
Speaking of elephants, did you know that they mourn? That flies do, too. That grief is so natural, such an honest part of our nature, that it has been so obscured and so condemned and made to appear so alien ~ that it is centered on sensation and this has been sterilized and disguised ~
I am personally tired of the human-centric view of this world; the ‘scientific fad’ that attempts to suggest that animals adapted emotions from us, or that emotions aren’t universal, that sentience isn’t the fabric of our sensitive connections. I am tired of the passive sentiments that trap our animalia identities into the foray of our refusal to be attuned: that consciousness has to be exhaustively proven in numbers and scales when it is clearly all around and within us. I am tired of the fad that focuses only on the wiring of the brain but not the bigger picture: the body, the environment, the world as it has been stripped of its empathy and how all of these collective despairs have bred imbalances in our brains ~ our brain(s), the receiver, the transmitter, but not the one and only hub of existence, and certainly not the center of all intelligence.
And circling back to fish ~ one of our earliest Ancestors, and science finally caught up to an already well-known truth ~ I am personally exhausted that wildlife gets compared to aspects of ‘civilized’ humanity on a regular basis. We are related, we have strong similarities, and we are different. Celebrate this diversity and this harmony and this uniqueness. To enlist another prominent example of this kind; Wolves don’t deserve the political jargon that is slathered on them. Wolves have culture within their pack, as we do. They are capable of a whole spectrum of experiences and intelligences, both brutal and beautiful (by our distinct discernments) and an awareness beyond us: varied per geographical and climactic influences. They are impacted by environments of scarcity and resource and how they are raised to move through this world. What they experience. What they share. What they sense. What they want.
So why would you want to call a group of ruthless, gutless people by any name other than what they are? Why continue to camouflage them? What a disservice to our wild kin, who don’t deserve to be lumped in the categories of our messy political partisans.
If we are going to specialize people and identify them, as naturalists do in the wilds ~ and who do we think we are to claim that we are not wilderness woven, too ~ then I have a suggestion to make for the white nationalist fucks who showed up at our Pride event:
Cowardis Fuckofferus (of the genus EetDeezNutz)