PSA: You Are Not a Cat

 

There is a phenomenon that has been well-documented on the internet, the place where people document things happening to cats: when you place a cucumber behind an unsuspecting cat, it will lose its ever-loving little furry shit. Multiple gifs and YouTube videos of this phenomenon exist. Cat + cucumber= YIPES!

For most people (not Mike Johnson or Ken Hamm or assorted creationists) this can be explained by evolution. Cats only have so much bandwidth in their little brains and some snakes are DANGEROUS. They aren't hardwired to leisurely inspect long green things to figure out whether they are snakes or inoffensive vegetables. They are hardwired to get away from the weird thing sort of shaped like a snake that seems to have just slithered up to them. 

That's cats. They don't do a whole lot of thinking. If you've ever pulled one out of blinds, or a Christmas tree, or unhooked their claws from your pants leg, you are aware that despite their occasional grace and agility, they can be weird little clowny guys. They literally bite the hand that feeds them. They try to fit their whole behinds in a Kleenex box. They evolved to be a better mousetrap, not to build one. 

There is a phenomenon that has been documented on the internet, and all of recorded history, of human beings making a categorical error of confusing identities with morality. Individual humans make decisions and take actions that may be morally sound or not. Whole groups of people do not become suspect because of the individual behaviors of other people based on their identities: not their ethnicity, their nationality, their religion, their gender-identification, their sexuality, their political affiliation (for the most part) or what hand they use to eat with. (Is that last thing still a thing?) 

It might have something to do with evolution. Once a long time ago, we didn't have nice things and fought over scraps of food and acres of land and maybe a stranger was going to pillage your little village and take "brides" which is actually a very horrible idea. Maybe there is some kind of reason human brains have a little trigger in them that assumes other humans are going to eat their children unless they are bonked on the head or shot through with a projectile that has to do with evolution and human experience, but the thing of it is, that, unlike cats, we evolved to do thinky things, not just pouncy kill or run away things. 

We can actually think about whether people we have met or just vaguely know about actually did anything personally themselves and then not act like angry townspeople in a Frankenstein movie.

 Because we are bigger than our triggers. Your fellow human is not a snake-shaped cucumber. We are not cats. 

And I'm deliberately not including links to people behaving exactly like what I'm describing because this a blog, good people, not a litterbox.