YET ANOTHER ANGRY MOB

The infamous Salem witch trials began during the spring of 1692, after a group of young girls in Salem Village, Massachusetts, claimed to be possessed by the devil and accused several local women of witchcraft. 

As a wave of hysteria spread throughout colonial Massachusetts, a special court convened in Salem Village to hear the cases. A total of 19 people would be tried and sent to the gallows, while some 150 more men, women and children were accused and systematically persecuted over months to come.

Artists impression of a Salem court. At time of writing, those accused of
Cecil's 'murder' have not enjoyed even this much due process.

The 19 were executed on evidence which, in these more ‘enlightened’ times, we recognise as nothing more compelling or reliable than innuendo, ignorant superstition and the opportunistic manipulation of rumour and circumstance. 

Yet for whatever it was worth at the time, the accused did at least have the benefit of a trial; an opportunity to face their accusers, to explain their statements and actions before sentence was carried-out.

This is more than can be said for those accused of killing Cecil the lion.

As in the Massachusetts of 1692-93, the clarion call has gone out. The community is outraged at the rumoured actions and variously reported and oft contradicted breaches attributed to a US dentist and his hunting party. A new-age Puritan movement has decided enough is enough! Society can no longer tolerate those who continue to embrace the old, less enlightened ways. 

They must be punished, preferably by public hanging, if PETA has its way, so they might serve as a cautionary tale.

Print and electronic medias have reported, in great detail, the unbridled anger levelled by a virtuous mob at those involved in Cecil’s death. The names and addresses of the accused have been disseminated via social media, where people, proud to be superiorly endowed with the gift of empathy, consumed nonetheless with unmitigated hatred, fantasise about executing a myriad frighteningly imaginative forms of retribution, which they consider warranted in “seeking justice for poor Cecil”.

Yet at time of writing, there has been no complete and reliable disclosure of the charges against those involved, no trial and certainly no verdict.

Ask the mob upon what facts they base their demands for swift, firm and uncompromising 'justice' and their responses betray the staggering level of intellectual incompetence inherent in almost every respondent:

“Well, they’re obviously guilty, aren’t they!”

“I hate hunters. They all deserve to die in pain!”

“I have no time for people without empathy. If I had my way, we’d shoot their children in front of them so they’d know how it feels to lose a loved-one!”

And so on. 

This was the mob mentality that prevailed in Salem Village in 1692. We read accounts of those events and shake our heads in amazement that people could have been hanged on the basis of rumour, hearsay and testimony equivalent to, “She turned me into a newt!” Yet here we are, in the Year of Our Lord 2015, still as intolerant, still as hateful, still as predictable as ever we were.

We are still hypocritical, self-indulgent bigots too.

Dare suggest a “woman’s place is in the home” and you’ll be assailed by an angry mob, torches ablaze. Suggest that hunting is a sign of dubious sexual prowess e.g. “real men shoot with cameras!” or “big gun, small dick!” and one is, of course, a veritable beacon of social responsibility and enlightenment.

Society – white, first-world, non-African society at least – is emphatic. Lions, elephants, rhinos etc., must be left to roam the plains of Africa wild and free, unhindered just as God and nature intended.  They are beautiful, majestic, noble creatures and posing no threat whatsoever to anyone, they just want to live and be left alone. 

Anyone who’s watched the Discovery Channel knows this to be fact! 

But the hundreds of thousands of impoverished people who live among these charismatic species don’t get the Discovery Channel. 

60 inch 3D plasma televisions, I’m reliably advised, can be dashed tricky to mount on the walls of your average mud hut and satellite dishes cobbled together from discarded bicycle rims and old goat skins are not what they’re cracked up to be...especially when vegans insist the skins must remain firmly affixed to the aforementioned old goat. 

But African people do live bang in the middle of the locations where so many entertaining documentaries are produced and many struggle to understand why affluent white folks, who will likely never set foot in their country, love lions to distraction, but have no regard whatsoever for the welfare of African children. 

The conservancies where regulated hunting takes place are not vast tracts of uninhabited land set aside for animals alone as National Parks are here, in the US and in Europe. They’re inhabited, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year by thousands of people trying to eke-out an existence and a marginal living from even more marginal crops. 

Their children often sleep in the open fields at night, in an effort to ward-off raiding elephants and rhinos that think nothing of trampling a child who shouts the African equivalent of “shoo” at them while banging a couple of  old saucepans together.

Lions are not “simply gorgeous” to villagers who must send their kids to the creek for water a couple of times a day, never daring to wonder if they’ll make it back home, because living with the threat of losing a family member to a gorgeous lion is such an ever-present danger that if one started worrying about it, one would go very quickly insane. 

No, instead they just concentrate on having large families, while doing their best to kill the pesky lions before they pesky their way through the whole village. 

Imagine for just a moment, if you will, what it would be like if the metaphorical shoe were on the other foot. 

People the world over have seen the late Steve Irwin on the tele, talking about BEEEUTIFUL creatures from the dark continent of Australia, among them one known as the King Brown Snake. 

He has shown them glistening under the sun of their natural habitat, the Australian bush and he has even picked them up by the tail while he marvels at the various characteristics that make them BEEEUTIFUL, rare and even unique.

Sure, Steve is the first to admit “they can be a bit dangerous”, but he assures viewers they mostly avoid humans and, statistically speaking, they pose comparatively little threat. 

Of course learning that the world beyond our shores is smitten with the old King Brown, you’re going to leave him be when you find him sunning himself in your garden....aren’t you? 

You’re not going to break his back with a rake, lop off his head with a spade, shoot him with the 410 or otherwise harm Billy the Brown Snake are you, just because he may chase and bite one of the kids during breeding season?  Perish the thought!  

You’d not call in the experts to remove every last King Brown from your neighbourhood just to save a few white rugrats. That would be hypocrisy, what with your position on lions ‘n’all.

Still, we do live in the global community these days, so I suppose if the majority believes impoverished Africans should just get used to family members being killed by creatures heavier than the average family car and less amenable to reason than your typical Gray Nurse shark, so be it. 

No one is going to convince you the best way to ensure that the majority of dangerous African wildlife is here for future generations to anthropomorphise, is to make it represent something other than a daily horror that must be endured by people who consider the likes of lions to be just as mundane as rabbits on pasture. We white people are too smart to fall for that sort of thing, right?

If Cecilsteria has proven anything, it is not that the world is too enlightened to tolerate the activities of hunters, but rather that affluent white folks are still just as self-obsessed, just as committed to dictating what poor black folks must endure and just as contemptible in their willing and deluded ignorance as ever they were. 

We still find it easier to emote and hate in ignorance, than to task ourselves to look at the bigger picture and make necessary, if somewhat unsavoury concessions and regardless of the fact we may claim to be far more tolerant than ever before, we still long to hate, to be seen to hate, to hate with others and to harness our combined hatred to impose our will on those we consider to be less important.

Forget retaining metadata on the grounds that we need to protect society from the ever-present terrorist threat. Social media should be analysed pro-actively and lists of names compiled to ensure that the likes of those who have condemned the accused in the Cecil saga are never called upon for jury duty. 

They have proven themselves capable of applying all the objective intellectual rigor to the investigative process that could reasonably be expected of an intellectually impaired parsnip.

Anyway, I’ll get outaya way no...  

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