Questionable Behavior

What's with the cluster of flesh-eating stories in the news lately?

It started with the young woman who fell from a home-made zip line and cut a gash in her leg which some opportunistic flesh-eating bacteria moved right into.

It seemed like something they could fix pretty easily but next thing we knew, she was missing limbs and extremities and all over some bacteria? Couldn't someone have sprayed some Neosporin in the wound before they closed it all up and locked the bacteria in?

Then there were a few more flesh-eating bacteria stories, which were gross, but you don't expect a bacterium to be especially reverent of human life.

Then the story went from flesh-eating bacteria to flesh-eating humans.

And it was more than gross. It was gross and disturbing.

First, the guy on bath salts (allegedly) started eating a (living) man's face.

The terrifying thing here is, yes, this man was very likely high, but the drugs didn't create the behavior. They allowed the potential for the behavior to manifest. Somewhere in his brain was the desire and ability to eat a living person's face. If he could do this, and he's human, what keeps the rest of us from sinking our teeth into each other's face flesh?

It reminds me of the Hitchcock film, Rope. Some college students are taking a class with a professor who gives a lecture about superior and inferior people. The students think he means something he hadn't meant at all, and they murder another student they perceived as inferior. They stuff his body into a trunk, then throw a dinner party using the trunk as the buffet table. The professor is a guest and figures out what they've done when the dead guy fails to show up for the shin-dig.

The guilty parties, when found out, explain they'd acted on his ideas. The professor (James Stewart) is aghast. They hadn't understood his ideas at all. He says he would never be capable of murdering an innocent person because "something" would keep him from doing it. 

What does Jimmy mean? What is that something?

Respect for life? Reverence for life?

As sentient beings, we are all pieces of one organism. Like Jesus said, what you do to the least of my brothers, you do unto me. Right? Then there must be a lack of reverence for oneself in all of this.

Next was the guy in New Jersey who disemboweled himself, then threw his guts at the responding police officers.

That's just not nice. It's one thing to harm yourself, but don't usurp others' right to bodily dignity if you do. Keep it clean, people!

This morning we read of a college student who'd eaten bits of his roommate's brain and his entire heart.

This is bizarre but by now, we're kind of numb to the zombie stories. And I have to state the obvious. People do eat heart and brain all the time.

Catch an episode of Bizarre Foods on Travel Channel and it won't be five minutes before you're seeing the still warm liver of an unsuspecting animal being ingested by the host of the show.

Having not eaten meat (the flesh of sentient beings) in more than twenty years, to me, flesh is flesh.  

If we can allow animals to live a tortured life and then eat the flesh of those animals, how much of a leap is it to consider your neighbor free game?  

One time, my baby Max (may he be in peace, my beloved shih tzu) had a burr on his snoot. He wouldn't let me touch it because I had to dig it into his flesh deeper to be able to get it out and it hurt. I knew I had to do it and he'd likely bite me, out of sheer reflex, but I had to try again. I dug it in and pulled it out. He tried to back away from me, but his teeth never touched me.

If Max could keep from harming me in that situation, but a person doesn't know not to eat another person, who has the more evolved soul?

Being human is fraught with pain and suffering. Confusion and loneliness.

But really, do we have to start eating each other?