Food And Sex.

Powerful things and acts, food and sex. 

Both pleasurable, both sometimes satisfying, both primary on the survival list. Both have been with mankind for all his existence, unlike cell phones and computers which have only now in our time arrived and evolved.

There is a significant difference between food and sex and cell phones and computers in the list of primary needs. The first two are necessities and instincts while the others are contrived and artificial. 

Everybody knows that food is the primary urge in mankind for without it we die so food eclipses sex in the list of primary necessities.  No food, no sex, it's as simple as that.  It's like Sparrow, "no money, no love" where money is food and love is sex. You can't make love on hungry belly.

The person deprived of food has little and then no interest in sex. 

Sex is an instinctive urge that is pleasurable, but if you are starving to death you eventually will be unable to procreate. Sexual intercourse among starving people  must be virtually non- existent. The primary urge becomes prominent. Food before sex.

Food and sex are a formula for romance in modern society, thus the "date", the ancient ritual of courting refined in terms of today's so called standards, wherein the dinner and a movie is transformed into automatic sex by the end of the night. The standard may range between a fry chicken with a coke and a double movie down by Park Street theater to a Trotters for a steak and salad and a Machel Montano concert, to a Tiki Village feast and a concert at Queen's Hall but the ritual remains the same: after that, home to bed and procreate happily.

So we go along. Life is good.  There are people starving to death in the world but so what? That does not apply to us in this region for now at least so we have no concept of what it must be like to starve to death, and besides, we don't even want to think about that. Leave it for some other generation to figure out the obvious.

Meanwhile, let's all go eat and party and indulge our baser urges.

Death As Punishment

The moral melee over the death penalty is well justified as the issue remains controversial well into 2008.

Many want it implemented while others consider it an aberration and want to have it abandoned.

The "death penalty as a deterrent" advocates posit that the threat of death as a consequence of the deed will reduce the incidence of murder by changing perpetrator's minds: kill and you will die. Simple. No problem. 

The revenge-driven feel that if one has the temerity to kill somebody who they care about or outright love, the now hateful person must die for that act. Revenge, plain and simple, and believe it or not, from what I have read and heard, it actually makes them feel good. They get "closure", whatever that means. As if they could forget the horrible or otherwise facts of the deed by eliminating the perpetrator. Kill him (or her) and it's gone.

The abolitionists, with their more civilized approach view the death penalty as rooted in more primitive times, tribe times, when there was little alternative but to kill those who killed.

"An eye for an eye" is quoted in the Bible as law in the Old Testament, and that surely translates into a life for a life. In the Muslim faith, the thief has his hand chopped off as a guarantee that he will not become a repeat offender, and in the more extreme interpretations the death sentence is liberally applied. Ask Salman Rushdie.

It seems that the death penalty is rooted more in religion than in law. Yet the revised Christian philosophy advocates forgiveness and reconciliation in the New Testament, while Islamic extremists today increasingly push death as a penalty for wrongs perceived or otherwise. They quote the Qur'an as justification.

Who, if anyone, is right?

The US, that great disbeliever in the extremist Muslim philosophy, executes people, and thus has common ground with it's enemy. It is a country that is increasingly in the minority of those who do. Just next door in Mexico, , there is no death penalty. 137 countries have abolished it, yet there are 24 countries which enforce it, quite a few of those in the Caribbean, including Trinidad & Tobago.

Albert Schweitzer was reputed to have proposed the philosophy of the sanctity of all life.

Tolkein, a veteran of the most brutal war man has ever witnessed had this to say on the subject through his mouthpiece Gandalf: "Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement".

Man with his modern technology can create and destroy many things; yet he cannot create life, and so should not destroy it.

Family

Family.

Strange word. Fam-ily. 

Family.

The definition in Wikipedia reads as follows: Family denotes a group of people affiliated by consanguinity, affinity, and co-residence. Go and figure that out for yourself.

Meant to convey a sense of familiarity, the term and the reality of family when most of us come face to face with  it means a sense of being at ease with people who you know well and are familiar with, whose quirks and strengths and failings and follies you can endure and even enjoy eventually. People who you know and who you care about and whose company you enjoy, whatever the circumstances. If bad, pull together, if good then lime and laugh.

Family.

"Bring back the old time days, bring back them old time ways" said Nappy Mayers wise man that he was. Them old time ways revert right back to family and to what has been largely lost in this 21st. century.

Family.

It has been said that you can never go home any more. That is a lonely thought.

Having family means that you can be at home if only for awhile, to again share all the times, the events of our lives, our past, our present and our potential future, if not all together, then at least somewhat together.

Having family means that you can go home.

The Only Living Weakling

Not long ago finished The Only Living Witness, the so-called definitive book on infamous serial sex killer Ted Bundy by Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth

Upon reflection it seems to me that Bundy ranks with Saddam and Hitler. They were three terrible men. All were mass murderers. All raped or facilitated rape, all were extremely cruel, all had a callous disregard for any type of life, particularly of the human variety. Bundy is especially interesting because compared to the others, he was a small man, a nothing man, without vision or a plan for world dominance or his version of mass murder. He was only in it for the sex.

Michaud and Aynesworth attribute the following statement to Bundy: "For some reason it was a necessary way of looking at things. I mean, there are so many people. It shouldn't be a problem. What's one less person on the face of the earth, anyway?"

He was reputed to have repeatedly performed sexual intercourse upon the remains of women that he had killed, and to have in some cases hacked off their heads, carrying them home with him to decorate and to dwell upon, leaving the rest of his victim's remains to be ravaged by animals of all types which were "doing his job" for him.

Good old Ted, the Republican fundraiser, the psych student, the well-mannered charmer. But Bundy was in reality a selfish imitation of a man who cared for nobody but himself. The social science analysts can formulate many terms: psychopath, sociopath, on the wrong path, to fit the man. They can think up all kinds of excuses for why he was the way he was.: it was the way he was treated by his mother, they speculate, and by his father, and all the things that happened to him. Those things and events made him what he was. 

I say that is rubbish. Many men have risen out of the most appalling circumstances without becoming a shallow man who had it easy compared to say, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had it a lot harder. Charles Dickens had it harder too, and  many whose names now escape me and yet  others who came long before and after him. No. "I am not buying it", as the journalists say.

I believe that there is a potential Bundy in all men. We all at some time in our lives have base thoughts about how we would like to behave and act out. Men recognize their potential to be savages, to gratify themselves in a manner which satisfies the crudest desires which arise in their minds and to use their physical superiority to subdue women to their will. 

Should all men behave in this manner then undoubtedly  our society would quickly revert to a much more primitive age, into chaos even. 

Quality men deny the savage side and become breadwinners, husbands, fathers, musicians and writers, engineers and businessmen, farmers and fishermen and many other occupations that contribute to a perceived better society.

Bundy had too much time on his hands and nothing to do with it and he chose to indulge a savage obsession. He was weak and useless. That's all there is to it.

Men of Bundy's ilk exist and they live among us in disguise, not so much in T&T (yet, at least) as in the wider world.

So beware of monsters masquerading as men walking among us.