German shepherd and kitten nuzzling. Deer fawn and golden lab cavorting in a forest-bordering backyard. Cat and parakeet poking playfully at each other. Cute, but I can’t help but wonder how many such encounters end tragically, with most (?) having been set up to see what will happen, with YouTube glory in mind from the get-go.
My interest here, however, is the great maw of an appetite we humans have for this genre. One possibility: boredom reaches deep and wide in our culture. Another, kinder thought: Our appetite for this material points to a hunger, a hope, for happy homey relations among fearful, suspicious, wounded and angry humans.
If such is our hunger, we nay be well prepped for the plea from a wise man who is actually more than a wise man, who said, and I’m paraphrasing here, “You will wind up being fulfilled and satisfied if you have a deep, relentless hunger and thirst for the putting right of human relations” (Matthew 5:6).
If you look it up (my paraphrase being bait for you to check the real thing), you will find, in most versions, the word righteousness, which you might find preachy-sounding and off-putting. My understanding of the term puts it very close to justice, which basically has to do with the putting right of human relations. I would like to see more written tiday about a correlation between social polarization and economic disparity.
Would we at least have the same appetite, even hunger, for human reconciliation as we do for animal togetherness (at least when they are well fed)?