One Red Hot Country Mama!

  I was at the gym on Sunday watching the screens while running and sweating and CBC veteran reporter Joe Schlesinger was on talking about elephants. Through the reduction in their natural habitat by expanding human settlement and increased poaching, elephants are becoming more violent, some suffering from Elephant Breakdown, a kind of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

The show went to the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee (with the very cool URL of www.elephants.com) a 2,700 acre sanctuary dedicated to caring for old, sick and needy elephants. There are currently 19 living there. Some of the elephants have killed humans, a crime that would usually be punishable by death, but the sanctuary accepts elephants as the social, emotional animals that they are, with long memories and ability to recover from their stress through therapy.

A New York Times Magazine article posted on their site by Charles Siebert writes thoroughly on the subject:

All across Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia, from within and around whatever patches and corridors of their natural habitat remain, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, attacking and killing human beings. In fact, these attacks have become so commonplace that a whole new statistical category, known as Human-Elephant Conflict, or H.E.C., was created by elephant researchers in the mid-1990’s to monitor the problem.

Even in India, where elephants were considered a deity, a headline of a newspaper warns “To Avoid Confrontation, Don’t Worship Elephants.”  Why is this happening?

Elephants, when left to their own devices, are profoundly social creatures. A herd of them is, in essence, one incomprehensibly massive elephant: a somewhat loosely bound and yet intricately interconnected, tensile organism. Young elephants are raised within an extended, multitiered network of doting female caregivers that includes the birth mother, grandmothers, aunts and friends. These relations are maintained over a life span as long as 70 years.

Why is the network weakening?

This fabric of elephant society, Bradshaw and her colleagues concluded, had effectively been frayed by years of habitat loss and poaching, along with systematic culling by government agencies to control elephant numbers and translocations of herds to different habitats.

What happens when they lose that network?

The elephants of decimated herds, especially orphans who’ve watched the death of their parents and elders from poaching and culling, exhibit behavior typically associated with post-traumatic stress disorder and other trauma-related disorders in humans: abnormal startle response, unpredictable asocial behavior, inattentive mothering and hyperaggression. Studies of the various assaults on the rhinos in South Africa, meanwhile, have determined that the perpetrators were in all cases adolescent males that had witnessed their families being shot down in cullings.

Wow. It is hard to ignore the similarities between elephant society and human society – animal researchers strive to avoid anthropomorphism in order to stay objective, but I can see how it is hard to resist. After the show ended, I had that feeling of helplessness and discouragement that comes from watching a show like that in Toronto, where there is extremely little I can do any time soon to help. I had a stressful day to worry about at work and I have bills to pay. Now I am also worried about the human race causing an animal crisis… I am only 1 in 6 billion…

I got off of the treadmill and went to lift some weights and started thinking more about elephants. The Bronx Zoo in New York City is no longer holding elephants in captivity because of the harm that it causes them. Awareness is good. The woman who founded the Elephant Sanctuary used to manage elephants for entertainment and now she has dedicated her life to providing awareness about the elephant crisis. That is an inspiration. I choose to replace that helpless and worried feeling with compassion. And one day, who knows, maybe I can do something.

Every woman I have ever met, no matter what she looked like, has admitted that the celebrity version of beautiful has hit her self esteem. Looking at magazines, TV and movies, every woman has had that nagging feeling that she can never be beautiful enough for her boyfriend/husband/future partner. But, where would those celebrities be without their:

• hours of free time to spend at the gym
• personal trainers
• make up artists
• chefs who make the healthy food delicious
• make-up artists
• hair stylists
• plastic surgeons
• lighting technicians
• maids so they don’t have to be stressed out by cleaning

And as if that was not enough…

• photoshop airbrush tools hiding any lasting imperfections

This video is heartening, because it shows that even celebrities, with all of the advantages in the world, can look like the rest of us some days. With all of their enhancements in, celebrities are more like beauty caricatures, akin to cartoons with all of the paint and photoshop, than real people. If these celebrities, who were chosen for their roles in part for their beauty cannot reach their own standards naturally, how are the rest of us supposed to live up to them? Fewf! for the rest of us.

I  have the book cover here for Everything Bad is Good for You not because I have read the book yet (but I will since it looks interesting) but because of the picture on the cover. The picture, with a guy with a screen on his head, illustrates exactly what I have been thinking about lately.

It is a simple theory of perception, where everyone sees the world through their own personal TV screens, not through objective reality – especially when it comes to people. What you expect to see and what you  have seen before effect the screen. You can only see your own screen, not reality directly. This phenomenon is apparent even in the field of science, where despite the rigorous scientific method there are still sincere practitioners who have been betrayed by their hopes, fears and ambitions into proposing false theories.

This means when someone criticizes you, they are simply criticizing what is on their screen, not who you actually are. The same goes for when someone compliments you – they are complimenting what they see on their screens. I find that in all relationships, whether it be friendship, professional or romantic, usually one person’s screen differs from the other.

The friendship means more to one person that the other – so on one person’s screen the importance of it is exaggerated, where as on the other’s it may be very faded and distant. Professionally, a boss may see a lot of potential in an employee but meanwhile the employee hates the work and is just doing it to pay the bills. The boss sees the employee following in his footsteps on his screen whereas the employee tries to eclipse her job on her screen with what is most important to her.

It makes a lot of sense to say to people you are in a relationship with "hey, this is what I see on my screen, what do you see on yours?". Of course it is impossible to see someone else’s screen without becoming them, but a description can make sure that you are on the same page. I just did this in my most recent 3-month dating relationship. I saw our interactions one way, he saw them in another. His way was diminished down to a strictly physical relationship where mine wasn’t. I asked him to leave because his perception was insulting to me and now it is over. So in the end we rejected each other because we rejected the versions of the relationship that were on our screens.

Aligning screens would be easier if people were honest all the time, but unfortunately we aren’t. People will lie about what is on their screens for all kinds of reasons, including safety (I find my clerical job putting stamps on envelopes very fulfilling!), fear of hurting others (I think the sexless marriage is just going fine) or because of pleasure (if I say ‘I love you’ will you still let me stay over once a week?) Despite this, it is worthwhile to at least try to be objective rather than being in your own world. After the initial sting, living in reality is much better than living in some fantasy Matrix dream-world or "lala land" as my friend Sylvia calls it.

The trickiest part about the screens is that the more distorted your screen becomes, the more certain you will be that what you see there is accurate. There is no one so sure as someone totally deluded.

*Thanks to Matthew McKay for inspiring these thoughts