Bring cats to protests!

[DreamGypsy]

1. I'd love to change the world, but I don't know what to do...

...so I'll leave it up to you.

Yeah, our priorities are pretty screwed up most of the time. We've become a society, a culture, maybe even the whole species, that is so exposed to daily strife, tragedy, violence, hatred, and despair on a global scale that we often retreat into our personal shells.

Attempting to rescue a family member, a companion animal, is easy to understand. The problem is short term, the consequences are immediate - the family member survives or not, the rescuer succeeds, or fails, maybe dying as well.

I once had to wade through a short stretch of waist high want to swim my two dogs to safer ground when the house was surrounded by flood waters (which fortunately didn't rise to cause damage). I have never directly experienced a long term, massive threat to my family, home, health and community, like that posed by tar sands extraction - a situation where the possibilities of success are few and ill-defined, and the consequences of failure broad and

Greg Brown wrote:

I watched my country turn into a coast to coast strip mall
And I cried out in a song.
If we can do all that in thirty years, then please tell me you all,
Why does good change take so long?

Much earlier, Alvin Lee wrote a song that I think expresses similar sentiments: