The Nature of Things

Posted by Cynical Sarah on October 18, 2006

We humans are funny creatures. We have one bad experience with something like a spider or a salesman, and suddenly every spider or salesman is bad. Do you suppose it’s in our genes to over-react and label things that way – possibly a defense mechanism ingrained in us all from our early days when we weren’t so high on the food chain?

When Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, died a few weeks ago, I was tempted to do a spoof story about how people were getting revenge for his death by issuing a kill order against stingrays. It would have been a good poke at human behavior, but, like President Bush, Irwin is too easy a target.

Plus, even the cynical part of me realized it was completely unfair to take advantage of someone’s death for my own amusement. Not to mention, I’d rather not give people crazy ideas of how to seek revenge for an international star’s death.

So I sat on the story, waiting to see if it would be more appropriate in future weeks. Turns out reality beat me to the punch though. News came out that stingrays were being found on beaches dead with their tails cut off.
Apparently the world doesn’t need my help finding stupid ways to get retribution. True to form, instead of thinking of it as a horrible tragedy or just an accident, the stingray bore the blunt of the blame for some fans who wanted to do something about the Croc Hunter’s death.

Irwin would have been happy with a memorial of some sort, increased donations to wildlife foundations around the world, something along those lines that would have helped the natural world he was so passionate about rather than harmed it. Instead, a select group took the total opposite reaction and sought to destroy the animal that did him harm rather than to follow what the Croc Hunter would have and what common sense should have told them – the animal was not to blame.

But, like I said, it seems to be human nature to react to things that way. Think about it – if you stub your toe on a chair, do you blame yourself for not paying attention? No. Your natural reaction is to get angry with the chair, maybe even knocking it down or out of your way while the pain is still throbbing in your foot, clouding your judgment.

It’s worse when it comes to animate objects rather than the inanimate ones like chairs. We can place even more blame on them because they actually have brains and really could have been trying to hurt us on purpose. So if you’re bitten by a snake, suddenly all snakes are bad and out to get you. There are rattlesnake hunts, and even innocent green snakes see the bad end of a hoe in gardens.

It’s no wonder people develop such severe phobias about things when we react so strongly to accidents and incidents like death by stingray or a throbbing toe.

So what happens when we start taking it to even more of an extreme? If we let our survival instinct take over, it could mean that eventually we’ll get the urge to somehow stop everything that’s every done us harm in some way, like the bad driver who cut you off the other day, or the salesperson who overcharged you for something, or the waitress who spilled coffee on your new pants. We’ll end up spending our whole lives avoiding or trying to stop bad drivers, salespeople, and clumsy waitresses.

What kind of life is that?

- Sarah L. Polson

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Tags: celebrities, humor

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