A Turtle

Some might argue that, with the weight of issues in a Presidential campaign, House campaigns, the US active wars collection, housing crisis, credit crisis, and everything else spinning out of control, it’s silly to blog about a turtle. However, the fate of this turtle had a rather-profound effect on my family’s day, and I think it’s symptomatic of a problem in US culture.

This morning, the five of us went to Sunrise Lake for a swim before my wife had to work in the afternoon. As we were heading home, I spotted a turtle in the road. We talked very briefly about whether we should stop and help it across the road, decided that we should, and I turned around. Two cars had passed us going the other way, and I did express some concern about it.

Sure enough, the turtle was on the yellow line, smashed and dead. My wife assured the boys that it was an accident, that someone was driving along and didn’t notice it until it was too late. My older son is still mad about it, and rather fumed about people who don’t watch what they’re doing.

For my own part, I can’t help but notice how the road bends there, and that if someone had to swing all the way out to the yellow line, and in that particular place it’s easier to drift away from it. I suspect a more-deliberate act, though I certainly didn’t share this with the boys.

So, there’s one less turtle in the world? What difference does it make, right?

The problem is that, if this was deliberate, then it reflects an ongoing problem in our culture. Why would you feel the need to run over a turtle? What is the source of amusement? Is there some reason that you need to kill a creature for entertainment?

If it wasn’t deliberate, then there is the problem that people are too involved in other things to pay attention to what’s around them.

I eat meat. I feel no guilt over it. I know hunters, and bear them no ill-will. When I hear about their 2,467 different recipes for venison chili, and how at least one such family prefers venison to turkey on Thanksgiving, I know that they’re using the deer they’re hunting. They aren’t killing anything for entertainment, they’re using the animal. While it’s not my thing, I don’t have a particular ethical problem with it.

But this person clearly isn’t using the dead creature. The death alone was what was entertaining.

In more-conventional entertainment, the same kind of principle applies. Heroes commit acts of torture, death is casually dismissed, and the very nature of the “splatter-film” genre is always good for a rant.

However, it goes beyond that. For as long as I can remember, conservatives have predicted that the casual treatment of life and death in entertainment would spill over into other aspects of life, and would bring about a profound weakening of our social fabric. In recent years, it is the Right that shows as dramatically this weakness as the Left.

In the Charles Dickens classic “A Christmas Carol,” Ebenezer Scrooge coldly remarks that the poor might as die “and decrease the surplus population.” (The reaction of those collecting for charity is seldom captured well in film versions … except in the “Muppets Christmas Carol” version, actually, in which Beaker and Bunsen Honeydew are utterly horrified.) While that view is almost-universally derided, it still seems a popular (if unspoken) sentiment when we’re discussing whether to help people who didn’t have the sense to be born in this country, who didn’t become wealthy enough to afford prescriptions, heating oil, and food; that sort of thing.

At the same time, one can’t imagine burdening a family with the difficulty of raising children with Down syndrome or other such handicaps, so it is encouraged to kill them off before they’re born.

How many people lament that we didn’t kill more people in Iraq? They’re not talking about effectiveness in winning a war, they simply want to punish people for living in the general vicinity of those who don’t like us. Killing more people would make them feel better. Or, at least, they can’t be bothered to tell the difference between the innocent and the guilty.

Am I taking this to an extreme? After all, it’s only a dead turtle. I’d say no, because it symbolizes a greater problem. Death is entertaining, and the lives of others aren’t worth our own inconvenience.

Alone, maybe it’s not a major crisis. However, I think it points us in the direction to see the greatest one we face.