Tuesday, January 1, 2019

Titular obsession

I suppose I could have come up with a title a tad less obscene sounding... Because no, this rant isn't about girls wanting breast enhancement surgery, or every guy ever born.
It's about titles. And individuality. Or perhaps conformity. Fuck if I  know; I just write this shit, I don't claim to understand it.

Anyway, I was reading an article about cow farts this morning, and the 'carbon footprint' these odorous emanations generate. While admittedly more concerned with the solid emissions from the rear of a cow, and how it affects my footprint, I couldn't help but notice all the titular separations we humans use to describe ourselves: ecologist, carnivore, vegan, environmentalist, etc., all in a simple article about cow farts. 
And as if we need more ways to differentiate ourselves from our fellow birth-to-death sojourners, we make shit up! Now, it's not only what you eat, but where it's from. You, too, can now be a Locavore!

And again, here we have a confusing sounding word similar to our obscene sounding post title. This one, Locavore, means eating 'locally' produced foods. These local foods can be either meat based, plant based, or one can only assume entomophagy based: the practice of eating insects, which would of course include locusts.

But the article also caused some of the neurons in my brain that were still half asleep at 4:00 AM to wake up and start a conversation with the others that were already up drinking their coffee and starting their day. (Just between you and me, dear reader, I'm fairly sure some of the neurons get up early to spike their coffee before the rest are up and about. Which only increases the likelihood of unusual morning conversations from the Voices...) 
What is it that practically requires us to assume superiority over each other? 
I assume somewhere back in the annals of time, mankind discovered it was easier to fend off the ravages of other meat eaters by banding together and providing a united front in order to cover our backs, and maybe this is where it all started. Moog was a huge, hairy, robust Hunter, and all the hot hairy Neanderthal ladies with their beetling brows and bow-legged beauty swooned over him every time he came in covered with blood and hauling a mastodon hambone over his shoulder. One can practically see them clustering around him in their slope shouldered femininity, screaming "hit me, hit me" and offering their long snarled and muddy tresses to be dragged off to his cave. Meanwhile, scrawny Uggagug, a lowly Gatherer, only got the ugly girls: those nasty looking ones with the straight spines and small noses who actually (ugh!) washed! Well, mankind, being mankind, wasn't going to change just to suit poor Uggagug, and so he did the only thing he could think of to change his status. Rather than feel bad about being a lowly Gatherer, he decided he'd actually feel better about himself than Moog by the simple expedient of doing something Moog didn't! 
I don't know what this might have been. It happened a long time ago, and I wasn't there. But let's assume for the sake of argument that he decided that contrary to genetics, DNA, nature, and, oh, I don't know, maybe HAVING A PENIS, he was going to be a girl.
This was definitely something Moog would never do, and therefore set him apart from Moog. Because now Uggagug was a homoSEXUAL, while Moog wasn't even a homoSAPIEN yet! It didn't change any of the socioeconomic gestalt of the tribe, but it gave Uggagug a TITLE!

What is our obsession with needing so many ways to separate ourselves? Isn't it enough to be a "good person"? 
How about a "caring human"? How's THAT for a title?

Why this insatiable need to constantly separate ourselves into smaller and smaller subgroups so we can somehow be part of something bigger? Something greater than ourselves? Does being an elitist make us better? Isn't it enough to be just a vegetarian? 
If, somehow, we could stop striving to be "included" in groups that for the most part only bestow a titular identity, and no real substance, perhaps we could make a REAL difference.
I'm an omnivore. A prepper. A Constitutionalist. A white male. And, according to some people, a Prick, a Jackass, and an Asshole.
None of which changes ME. The persona I identify as Myself . Or who YOU are. 
The world's getting scarier and meaner out there. Sabertooth tigers and hairy mastodons looking for their missing hams aren't what we have to fear anymore. Its the joiners and groups that for some reason think they need to rid the planet of all the 'not-thems' that we have to fear today. The people with those other titles: Bigot, Racist, Rich, Poor, White, Black, Christian, Muslim.... Its getting so nobody is just John, or Bill, or Mary anymore. Everyone needs to be somehow more than who they are.
And, I believe, only makes us all that much less....

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