I love animals.
To my knowledge that’s always been the case even if I can’t track that bit of me back to its genesis, and it is a love that is as deep as anything I know. I see them as Old Gods on a spinning blue marble, clinging to the world they used to rule while instilling a primal fear, as messengers for impossible things, and art that both lives and breathes. They’re everything I ever wish to see in the world and whether it’s a crow, a spider, a cow, or something far more exotic, they cause my eyes to widen with an expectation and awe that I trust will never fade. When humanity has had its run, they will remain as the stewards they’ve always been and I imagine the wind, rain, and trees will be happier for it.
Anyway.
Harambe was a western lowland gorilla who was shot and killed in May of 2016, most of which you’ll already know unless you’ve been living under a rock or are over 55 and without a stable internet connection. Why did this occur? Well, in short, it’s because a kid visiting the zoo with his mother fell into the enclosure and after the gorilla dragged him around for some ten minutes and became agitated by the commotion of the crowd, the zoo decided to take risk off the table and shoot a 17 year old gorilla. In front of a crowd and panicked parents, Harambe died in his enclosure and the child was removed safely.
It doesn’t matter how we got to that point, really. It doesn’t matter that this kid crawled through four feet of bushes, after scaling a three foot tall fence, before falling fifteen feet into a shallow moat. It never really matters how we get anywhere, not really, not while we’re there. Sure, it helps with the writing of our personal histories, but once this latest reality has been pushed into motion, we don’t find ourselves living in the what-if’s or what-may-be’s. There’s just the present on which the future hinges, dangling as a carrot at the end of what is either a pirate’s plank or a bridge to better things, and sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which. You can hypothesize and you can guess, but you never really know what’s going to happen. All you have is an uncertain stretch of time to decide the costs of being wrong with the understanding that you cannot ponder for long.
If you drag your feet enough, what will be…will simply be. And there is rarely any solace in that.
Moments and choices stripped down can be looked at as a simple comparison of extremes. Best case, the zoo doesn’t want to kill an innocent gorilla who is acting only as any territorial creature might, in time Harambe forgets about the kid or is drawn away, and the onlookers see a child dramatically whisked away to a loving mother’s arms. Worst case? Sensing the growing agitation of loud and panicked onlookers, a child is broken into pieces in a horrifying but understandable display that will be caught on cellphones and traumatically grafted onto the brains of everyone the story reaches. Are there other options? Of course. Reality might have played out an untold number of ways, but those are the most drastic. Presented in a best/worst case dichotomy, those in charge were forced to ask themselves if they had it in them to wager on a lifeform they couldn’t fully understand or engage in ways that were remotely helpful.
It might turn out alright. Then again, they might see a child die in ways no one is prepared to witness. Presented with that pendulum swing, it’s easy to see why a gun was fired and a gorilla died. Would I have done the same? I don’t know. We never really know what choices we’ll make until we’re truly asked to make them. I hope I would’ve made the right one, but then again most of us probably do even if we rarely know what ‘right’ could be in a given moment. Questions will follow and we’ll wonder whether the choice we made furthered the timeline or if we stepped off a plank, plummeting into water so cold that we aren’t even aware of what’s happening, but that doesn’t change the fact that the choice has been made. To decide in favor of avoiding the more tragic end is almost always more palatable than tempting fate with that dread specter of hope stapled to your sleeve.
Oddly enough, I found myself thinking about this as the looming shadow of the coronavirus pandemic grew taller and taller still. I’m not a scientific man, so I usually find myself in that movie role of the Puzzled Spectator who wanders around with general disinterest, waiting for someone to tell him that things are getting grim. In “Armageddon”, I’m an unnamed extra who spends his thirty-two seconds of screen time watching the news, wondering if we’re going to die and if Ben Affleck is really the best choice to save humanity. (He seduced a woman with Animal Crackers, for Christ’s sake!). I don’t know if those are just the cards I was dealt, doomed to be a spectator rather than an active participant, but oh well. Here we are. All I know is that this is where the story starts, with a perplexed author of perplexing unknown trying to figure out whether he should lock himself in a cupboard Harry-Potter-Style or go about his everyday life and hope things turn out just fine.
Maybe the end will be just the same no matter what I do, then again- maybe it won’t.
I’ve never been the best at analogies, I’m limited by personal scope, so I know this is flimsy. That being said, it’s how I make sense of things. I can’t ask myself to get to a logical end wherein I can see the future and know that everything will be alright, just as I can’t ask myself to see the tragic unfolding of inevitable ends. All I know is that I love animals, I was sad when a gorilla got shot dead, and I’ll extrapolate from there. See, if you were to ask many people who know me to describe me in a word, you’d probably have to cut through most of them before you got to anyone who said “Empathetic”, but that empathy is there. I might seem at times like a cold observer, but I’m doing my best to understand all that’s thrown at me the only way I know how: By building a house of cards and trying to see its structure before it all comes crashing down.
So for the sake of this point, let’s alter the analogy slightly.
We’re in a zoo and we’ve seen a child fall into a pit. In the deeper parts of this zoo, a fire has started and since all eyes are on the gorilla enclosure, that fire will only continue to spread so long as the interest of all observers is drawn to the spectacle at the zoo’s center. How the child got there and what poor parenting allowed it to take place are things that can be assessed in the aftermath, but for now we are all rooted participants, observers as this brand new frightful thing unfolds. The longer we stand by and do nothing, the greater the chance of the child dying and all the while the fire in the distance will grow. A decision to remain idle will see an end where perhaps the child will live and the fire will go out on its own. Then again, that child may be left dead and broken while we watch the world burn down around us. An infinite number of possibilities exist along either side of those two options, but as earlier noted we tend to perceive dangers as a pendulum swing and rightfully so. It is the want of our human perception and the ifs-ands-or-buts can be saved for dissection in the public arena, where an infinite amount of time can be spent on all the questions we figured we didn’t have the time to ask.
When forced to watch an unfathomable event play out before you in real time, you won’t know what to do. You won’t know how to prioritize. I spent the early stages of this pandemic wondering if my trip to Iceland would be slightly rockier than anticipated, unknowing that it would be canceled a mere month later. I wondered if it would flare out just as Ebola, SARS, Bird Flu, and Swine Flu had. They always had, after all. Most fires of that sort tend to burn out before they reach “us”, meant in the individual sense rather than the geographical. Most gorillas of that size tend to wander away and leave us no worse for wear. But what are we to do when that looming creature threatens closer to home and a fire rages, tempting us with the fear that we might be so distracted by the child in the enclosure that we don’t realize our world might be a pale imitation of what it once was when we get out on the other side of it all.
It is easy perhaps to say, forget the child. Crawl out of your shells and put out the fire, all onlookers and zoo employees alike. Will the gorilla leave well enough alone in your absence? We won’t know until we walk back to that enclosure to see what reality our choices have wrought. We will say “What use is it to confront and stand in the presence of this potential end if our petrified state results in the destruction of everything we know?” If we come out of a pandemic with a broken economy and a new Great Depression, is the cost of our focus and direction truly warranted? We will wonder if we would’ve done differently. If we could’ve saved both lives and our way of life, and we’ll keep asking ourselves those questions through various elections and published thinkpieces far more valid than mine, and we’ll travel down that roller coaster, that rabbit hole, until time itself runs out.
We are humans, after all. Never underestimate our ability to overthink.
All worries are in some way warranted and we’re held in place by the pendulum swing.
But let’s say instead of a frozen onlooker, you’re the mother who watches her son get dragged around the enclosure by a creature of strength unimaginable. Do you care that the world is on fire? Do you care how that fire burns out? Or is your only concern the life of a loved one, knowing that you can find comfort in confronting an uncertain future if that loved one is safe for at least a little while longer. What is the great joy and promise of a world where a fire has been put out if you’re told that you must now walk through it alone? It wouldn’t matter how many people in that zoo told you that everything would be alright. All you would know is that, for all intents and purposes, you’d lost.
See, I’m a Capitalist. I’m a small-C conservative/libertarian. I don’t like the idea of an economy collapsing, leaving us all in uncertain futures of mounting taxation and federal overreach on a scale heretofore unknown. I can fall down that rabbit hole a million different ways and see each potential end. Many of them are frightful. Many of them are not. But the prospect of doing nothing about the gorilla in the enclosure is sickening to me, because the allure of that certain future (that is uncertain in itself, because raging fires are unstable things) is one that holds little sway over me. I listened to an interview in which a man said “It’s impossible for me to say ‘Sacrifice Granny and Grandpa!’ for the sake of the goddamn GDP!”, and I understand that.
We all experience tunnel vision when it comes to those we love. If our child was in the enclosure, we’d fire that gun every single time. If our loved one might catch a virus that could kill them, we’d stay inside until the world falls down around us. Whether there were other options in the little moments before the child fell is irrelevant because we’re here now, we’re in the moment where it’s all unfolding before us as that towering shadow. And I’m not saying there are only two options, just that it’s understandable that people perceive it as such; as an existential threat either to those we love or the world we live in, and often both. But in the end we see the plank and bridge, the broad path cut from one extreme to the other, and we watch that pendulum swing.
There is a sense of immediacy, one aided by the comforting thought that we might yet kick the can down the road for the sake of current friends and family and figure it all out as we go along. There’s a loved one in a high risk group. There’s a child in a gorilla enclosure. We don’t know what will happen if we do nothing, we don’t know what awaits if we act in the only extreme measure that still feels like a choice and grants us some agency. Maybe, just maybe!, it all would’ve worked out fine if we hadn’t done anything at all. Maybe it all would’ve gone away on its own.
But we are only human, after all. And we will always ask “What if doesn’t?”.
We will always kill Harambe.
For better or for worse.