This could inspire the world
It's the cat's meow
In the wake of Thanksgiving, I’m diverting from writing about the mess the world is in to bring you what hearkens back to what I’ve written about concerning how to get out of it.
Watch this 5-minute video to see what’s gotten me dipping back into a major subject of mine:
I can’t imagine anyone taking issue with the sense of this, except half of the population that just voted for pain over pleasure – and not irrationally, since both political parties run us afoul by the money that sustains our legislators, and where, since any port could be better in a storm, people would vote in what will be even worse than what we have now.
What’s happening with the cats is illustrative of a key to what world salvation could depend on, where we’d move from the rugged individualism, that rewards individuals, to caring about each other as much as we care about ourselves. The model I hold up, that the cats fit into, is something they do in Norway. Watch this 9-minute segment from 2015’s Where to Invade Next, my favorite Michael Moore movie. If you don’t know about Norway’s prison system, you won’t believe your eyes – first, at seeing what they do, and then at what is so startlingly enlightened that you’d think we would have converted our system to doing it their way.
How insane we are not to think this way, where things that are every day normal for us, like boxing that individuals do and wars that nations make, are vestiges of the brutality characteristic of ages before we knew better. So is our U.S. system of justice regarding incarceration.
As you’d get from watching what Michael Moore delivered, what Norway does requires a radically different mindset from the one we hold in America. Here, where punishment supersedes rehabilitation, we get a 77% reincarceration rate after people leave prison, compared to 20% in Norway. Sacrificing the pounds-of-flesh we revel in, which inflicts pain you even could say prisoners deserve, to doing what makes a society succeed, is an example of the massive shift of perspective we could make to create a world that serves everyone.
So, I'm not so much ignoring the dire situation I usually talk about, but I am delivering the wisdom we all could give thanks for, that could spur us to change it.
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There is something so pure and vulnerable about having compassion and also acceptance. Animals don’t judge, but they also have a lot of awareness. They can sense bad energy. Deep down, they feel something from these prisoners that makes them feel safe. Ultimately, all of us just want to feel safe and taken care of, even the “bad” guys. If they can do it, so can we.
The recidivism rate is really the salient point. In 24 for states it's over 80%. How incredible would it be if it's cats that helps bring that number down.