When I was young I killed a snake. I wasn’t alone, I was
with a couple of other kids, but since my memories are of my own feelings and
behavior, I will relate the story without mentioning the others. The memory of
what I did disgusts me now, but at the time it seemed like an ordinary thing to
do. Killing was something people did. I saw it every night on TV, on cop shows
and war movies, everybody did it. You just had to be one of the good guys, that’s
all, and it had to be a bad guy you killed. Those were the rules, and if you
played by them, it didn’t matter how many you killed. You might disagree, but
that was the impression I got and those where the rules as I understood them.
Animals were a different story, I suppose, but if you were
looking for a bad guy, you couldn’t get a better animal to fill the role than a
snake. But it was okay to kill animals, I was taught that early on. Animals, at
least the fierce kind, were always being killed by explorers and super heroes
in the adventure books and comic books I read. It was a sign of virility that
Tarzan could kill a lion with nothing but a knife. I can still remember the
line from the Davey Crockett song: “killed a bear when he was only three”. I
couldn’t have been more than four years old when I heard that.
So I saw a snake in the grass one day and decided it needed
to die. As I followed it, I picked up a rock. It wanted nothing to do with me,
was attempting to get away. But it had committed the sin of occupying some of
the earth that still belonged to nature and not to man, the grass that was
allowed to grow around the houses that spread out all across suburbia.
I got close enough and I threw the rock at it, hit it. I
played a lot of ball and had a pretty good arm. I hurt it, knew I did, but it
was still attempting to squirm away from me, injured though it was. I found I
really had no heart for this endeavor, but knew I had to finish what I had
begun. If you’re going to injure a snake, you have to kill it. But damn, I had
no idea how hard it was to kill a snake with a rock, because the snake really wanted
to live and I discovered I really found the whole process most unpleasant.
Someone more adept at killing would have made shorter work
of it, would have made the snake suffer less, but I could barely allow myself
to see what I was doing. I felt a horror inside of me and the only thing that
allowed me to continue was that I was able to project this horror for my own
actions onto the snake.
I began to feel a great hatred for the snake, I imagined it
to be the symbol and totem of all that was bad in the world. The more I injured
it the more I hated it, because of the mindset my actions forced me into, a
world of hatred and violence, of blood and death. I had to believe it wanted to
cause me violence, because that was the only way to justify mine. I needed to
believe that snakes and humans were incompatible and eternal enemies, because what
the hell else could make me feel so almighty awful inside?
In truth, the snake had done nothing to me, it had only
sought to exist in a world dominated by man and his constructions and his
possessions. It only wanted to live its life in my neighborhood.
There was blood now, indistinguishable to my eyeball from my
own blood, or the blood of my mother or my dog. It was blood, the universal
life-giving fluid, the universal symbol of violence and death. And still the
snake lived, though its life now was nothing but agony. The deed still needed
to be finished. I discovered that throwing the rock was not going to get the
job done. It was easier for me to throw it, because it somehow distanced me
somewhat from the violence. Eventually, in order to finish the job, I had to
use the rock like a club, get up close and personal about it, intimately
involved so that I could no longer have any illusions about what I was doing.
And having finished it, the immediate desire was to wipe it
from my memory, to distance myself as much from it as possible. The dead thing
I gazed at was far more repulsive than the live snake it had been a moment ago.
I would have buried it if I could, but instead I picked it up with a stick and
flung it in an out of the way place. “There is evil in the world,” I thought to
myself, “evil that is best to keep distanced from the ordinary world we live
in.” For a long time there was a dark spot in my mind in that corner of the
yard between two fences where I flung the evidence of what I had done.
I behaved the way I did because I knew no better. If I had
had an older brother who owned a pet snake, I wouldn’t have done what I did.
Had I lived in a family or a time or a culture that respected nature and all
life more, I never would have done it. But I was born in an era that still
believed nature was something that needed to be conquered.
I was disgusted by the incident, though at the time I didn’t
fully understand why. But had I lived in a different situation, one where
violence was expected of me, I’m sure I would have learned in time to ignore
the feelings of horror and revulsion and eventually take pride in the violent
actions I participated in as long as society approved of it.
I don’t seek to avoid blame by shifting it to society,
indeed the point of this essay is that we should not look away from the evil
that we do or rationalize or excuse it. But the fact is had I been raised in a
different culture, I wouldn’t have behaved in a way that was so obviously
against my nature. And as much as the individual is responsible for his own
actions, he is also responsible for shaping the culture he is part of. If we
continue to accept a culture that sees the individual as completely separate
from the larger world, then we will continue to shape a culture that justifies
violence, the us against them mindset in which conflict is inevitable.
Nature has been conquered by man now, as much as it ever can
be while continuing to support man’s existence. The point of view that directed
or at least suggested my deed to me is no longer acceptable or workable in the
reality we now face. We must come to realize that we cannot continue to live in
violent opposition to nature but must find a way to peacefully coexist with it.
The change we must make is fundamental and profound. We must switch from perceiving
anything or anyone that is not our immediate friend, family, or countryman, as
enemies which excuse our violence and hatred.
We must stop viewing what takes place within that narrow bit
of nature that we call a yard as our domain where we are absolute masters. We
must stop viewing ourselves as apart from nature and the rest of humanity and
start seeing ourselves as a part of it. Only then will we be able to see
violence as the destructive force it is, incapable of making a better world or
a better future.
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