roadkill

On my way to the ferry today, on rural Paradise Bay Road, a raccoon dead on the center stripe, lying half on its side, half on its back, the upside down, open-eyed face frozen either in a grimace of sheer terror or snarl of rage, or both. This was a large, full-grown animal, its forepaws raised in a futile, beseeching gesture toward the insolent chariot that ran it down several minutes or an hour at the most before I passed that spot.

What had this unoffending animal done to deserve such an ignominious and horrifying death, other than to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? I doubt very much that the raccoon owed some sort of karmic debt which required its being offered up as an animal sacrifice to the god of automotive hegemony. It wandered onto Paradise Bay Road with a purpose in mind, motivated by its animal independence, and unafraid, because like all such sentient creatures it possessed a sense of its own dignity and self-importance. What a rude shock for the beast to discover, in its final seconds on earth, that its sense of itself was all wrong, and its life irrelevant, and very cheap of purchase in this bizarre world of which it knew nothing.

Our casual, unintended violence against the mild and harmless creatures we live among is shocking and frightening, and provides an analogy for the impact our modern, industrial way of life has had on our world. Our crimes against the earth, our mother, have been characterized until now by carelessness and slovenliness rather than evil intentions, but that too has begun to change as the pressure for us to reform our ways of living is increasingly resisted by a criminal and intransigent capitalist oligarchy.

There'll be lots more roadkill before we're done with this way of life.