Fuel the Fire

I don’t know what your reality is like, but I hear that reality can be cruel sometimes.  Is it all an hallucination, a bad dream?  It depends on your perspective.  Sometimes we buy into it, feed it.  Sometimes we feed on it.  Either way, it is a trap, one that is designed in such a way as to be perniciously escape proof.

How is this so?  Nothing is escape proof, you say.  I agree, but again, it depends on your perspective.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the practice of tying up an elephant with a rope while it is young.  When it is older and stronger, and able to snap the rope much easier, it has already come to accept the inescapability of the flimsy strand.  

So Mr. Elephant decides that there is something amiss in this world of his.  He smells fresh rain and remembers something, a tree reminds him of something else.  But what?  Enter crazy old Grandpa Elephant, the one they keep away from the others.  He says that there is a way out.

And why would he do that?  Why torture poor Mr. Elephant by causing him to question what is ‘true’?  

Ever go to the zoo?  Do you feel like the lioness should be somewhere else, stalking her latest meal?  ’Well, it’s cool that I got to see her, I guess.  It’s educational.’  So it’s all ok since you got to feed a bit off of the impression?  Is that why you go there and support slavery with your dollar? Ah, you vampire, you.  Is that why you have friends, too?  I guess we all gotta eat.

So Mr. Elephant is caught in a trap.  He wakes up, eats what they feed him, does what they tell him to, sleeps when they let him, shits on a concrete floor.  One night, Grandpa sees Mr. Elephant awake, sniffing the fresh rain.  Grandpa feeds this fire bit by bit, until Junior is willing to believe things that aren’t ‘true’.

And one day Junior escapes. They tranquilize him and send him back to the preserve, along with that troublemaking Grandpa of his.  All is well that ends well.

Ok, enough with the sappy Disney movie.  Why the hell would Grandpa say anything to the poor little ivory maker?  Well, it depends on your perspective.  Might I suggest that, if you were once bound by a rope that could not bind you, and one day your reality opened up, you might have a real emotion when you see another in the same situation.  And if that ‘other’ has enough of that gas in the tank we call necessity, you might just have to help them for some reason.  

It’s funny how the universe works.