First response to Earthlings

 I was surprisingly content with being sick after I started watching this documentary because I would not have wanted to watch it with anyone else watching me. My emotional and physical response to this graphic movie shocked me. I was shaking and sobbing and shielding my eyes like a small child watching a horror film. The pets section horrified and aggravated me to the extent that I could feel my blood pumping increasing my pressure. I relate to the puppies bodies being treated as garbage, worthlessly thrown into a truck in piles. I finally see the parallel to the Holocaust, and honestly it is hard to ignore. Murder is murder. "So beneath the many differences, there is sameness. Like us, these animals embody the mystery and wonder of consciousness (Narrator)."

  The food section made me rethink my eating habits, and I am going back to being a vegetarian, only eating organic foods. I am shocking at what our fellow earthlings can do to our other fellow earthlings. Has habit hardened people's hearts to such a point that watching a being suffer doesn't raise a flag? One think I really don't understand is the lack of attention given to the circle of life, natural competition, and the Darwinian theory of survival of the fittest. Not all animals can or should be saved. What about over population? What about disease? From just watching part 1, what is this documentary trying to achieve? Are they trying to evoke empathy and thus catalyze change? Or are they simply trying to be controversial for media attention? What can we, the watchers, realistically do? Why bring such attention to something we are seemingly helpless to fix?

I still think of "earthlings" in terms of Sesame street's song "We are all Earthlings" copy and paste url:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttwP02WXB0I

Lyrics: Some of us have feathers

Some of us have fins

Some of us are furry

And some of us have skins

We swim and hop and slither

And leap and soar and run

And we all live together

On a planet of the sun

CHORUS: We are all earthlings

We are all earthlings

Spinning around together

On a planet of the sun

We live in the desert

We live inside a tree

We live high in the mountains

Or deep beneath the sea

We live in tents and cabins

In houses just for one

And all we live together

On a planet of the sun

CHORUS

Floating down a river

Swinging through the trees 

Climbing up a mountain

Going with the breeze

All of us can have a happy healthy place to be

If we can float and swim and climb in earthling harmony

CHORUS

Maybe ignorance is bliss.