Jumping the Fence to Cuddle Corporations

Years ago, when I first moved to Miami, there was an incident at the Metrozoo in which a tiger killed a zookeeper who had entered its enclosure in order to drop off more food  (“Purina tiger chow”?).  The enclosure encompassed two separate “tiger areas” and apparently the zookeeper thought the tiger was in the other part of the enclosure and that the gate connecting the two areas had been sealed.  He thought it was safe.  Unfortunately for him he was wrong, and the tiger attacked, killed and mostly ate him.

This was a media sensation for about a week, and I remember listening to a radio interview with Metrozoo’s head zookeeper, who was asked if the tiger would be “put down.”  I loved the zookeeper’s indignant response:  “Hell no the tiger isn’t gonna be ‘put down’!  The tiger was just being a tiger!  He was doing what tigers do!”

I remember thinking that this was exactly right.  We pay our money and go to the zoo to see large, dangerous animals close up.  When somebody screws up and that large, dangerous animal kills someone . . . well, that’s why we pay our money to look at them.  Because we know that they can.

Gladstone on Crack

If you're not already familiar with Cracked.com then I really recommend you check it out. It is a very, very funny place that has articles like "The Five Smallest Animals That Can Kill You Horribly," or "The Seven Stupidest Reasons People Ever Went to War." I have wasted hours bouncing from article to article, laughing uproariously and picking up extremely interesting and outre factoids.

Anyway, one of the writers there, Gladstone, has a new article up titled "Three Types of Wall Street Protesters Hurting Their Own Cause." Like me, Gladstone is obviously a supporter of the Occupy Movement and, like me, he is worried that it may be sabotaging itself.

As Gladstone explains it, he lives in NYC and has had the opportunity to go to the Occupy Wall Street movement and listen to these people: "Unfortunately, what [] I hear is a lot of people talking about 'fuckin' Corporate America, man' and that's just about it. That is not the refrain of a successful protest." Gladstone then goes on to explain that this is why Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech in which he said "I have a dream . . . " and not one in which he said "I have . . . had it up to here with these crackedy ass crackers."

I also particularly liked Gladstone's tiger-at-the-zoo-that-mauls-your-family-to-death analogy. You should definitely click on the link and check it out.