The value of life, the cost of living

How is it that at a time that the cost of living is so how most people can't afford anything beyond basics, the value being placed on living creatures is so infernally low.

Trophy hunting is back in the news.  Every turn-of-the-century rich person had animal heads hanging in the man's version of the parlor.  Not this century of course, but the beginning of the one that just ended.  Most of the trophy's since that era of traveling to the jungles and savannah to kill something on its way to the endangered list have involved the heads of deer--think skinning cows that eat only grass, you know, like a cow, but have antlers, or large, well lacquered fish from a trip to the ocean. 

The fact that a bunch of rich, men's men from over a century ago would put dead things on their wall is not amazing.  Back then, we only studied animals and plants after we killed them, specimens floating in formaldehyde and butterflies pinned in glass covered boxes.  The idea of actually studying them alive, watching how they behaved was seen as odd and ridiculous--they were stupid animals, they didn't feel pain like we did, didn't think like we did.

That same time frame, we set lovely pictures of dead people, frequently posed as if they were alive, in our parlors.  We made wreaths of their hair and displayed them for all to see.  We pressed the flowers from their funerals and fastened them in frames.  We loved death. 

We also displayed the dead bodies of criminals in their coffins, and displayed the bodies of living and dead people and animals that were seen as "freaks".  Death decreased their value, but only slightly over the long haul and the net was good--they no longer required food and living space. 

We still have plenty of people that think like those individuals that loved to go ogle a three legged child or point and laugh at the corpse of a bank robber.  We don't have a lot of people creating art and jewelry from their dead loved one's hair. 

Today, most of us are making money that is going up very slowly.  While the cost of living is averaging an increase of over 3% per year, wages are topping out at 2% for most of us and that is by merit, if you are an average employee or an unvalued employee, you are getting less than that.    That means we are all peddling as fast as we can, but the bike isn't moving, its slowly going backward. 

The cost of staying alive is barely attainable for many of the people on the planet.  The cost of staying alive for many animals is beyond them.  We have grand creatures that have long been the symbol of courage and strength and regalness that are not even safe in a protected preserve.  We have little creatures like sparrows and squirrels and possums that litter the edges of roads making only those with great heart question if we couldn't do more to stop all the death.  The cost of living is very high for most living things.  We have valued life very low these days.

Life is the one thing that we humans can't create.  We can reproduce and we can even clone using science, but that thing that separates living from unliving---we haven't really got it.  Reality is, the clone, like our own reproduction, requires a living cell to start with.

Life should be the most valuable, most honored and most important thing to us.  So why do we spend money to kill.  Why do we gripe about the space taken up by other living things and the way the place they live makes the place unusable to us.  Why are we blind to our own evil.

Each of us, each living human has more in common with a butterfly or lion or mouse than it does with some manmade thing that we rave about or beg for or dream about.  Things are not ever more important than life.  People are never things, just as trees, bunnies, dogs are not things.  Being poor, being ill, being homely or disfigured or scary to look at does not make any living creature a thing.

Its time to raise the value of life.