Even though I support hunting, I don’t like the circumstances of what the Minnesota dentist did to that lion in Zimbabwe any more than most others. Poaching unfairly tars all hunters. I also agree with those who advocate a more measured and restrained approach about not rushing to judgment, and also, letting the facts and justice play out. Some of the most purely hateful social-media comments I’ve seen in years (and that’s saying something) have been over this issue. That’s nuts.

Now I’m going to ask for some big-picture perspective in all this, and some deeper thought than it takes to perform the manic, bandwagon-jumping, blindly conformist, mob-justice herd mentality so prevalent online. Before launching into the usual polemic, some questions to stimulate thought (as opposed to mere reaction).

Why this?

…and this, and thousands of others like it over the past week? [I blacked out no identifying info since they are posted to public sites.]

Violent mob justice in the digital era…whatever happened to innocent until proved guilty? Clearly these are reactionary and not reasoned responses, and indicate to me a pathological problem–the very same sort of mentality as those in KKK robes who lynched innocents, and those who burned witches at the stake. That’s the brutally honest truth. These people are behaving no better than the KKK lynch mobs and the witch burners.

Where was the same level of outrage and sometimes violent hatred on behalf of every lion killed by poaching in Zimbabwe (or elsewhere) before this one?

Would you even know about it if the lion had no name?

Chances are, your answer to these questions relates somehow to media coverage (or in prior instances, lack thereof). Your outrage is directly related to media stimulation you have received and accepted, your fast response to the choices made by Corporate Big Media editors to run with stories that incite and provoke, that appeal to emotional and not rational response. And you allow this? If so…

You are manipulated. Regardless of what you think about the killing of a popular lion in Africa…wake up, sheeple! You are letting yourself get played like a fiddle–the fiddle that plays whilst Rome burns. Overblown stories like that, or somebody flying a flag you don’t like, or what some has-been celebrity did to his body, are nothing more than appeals to anger, not level-headed reason.

They are diversionary tactics to sway your attention off far more impactful and important issues to far more people: the national debt, genocide in the Middle East, the slaughtering of millions of human babies before birth, rampant corruption and lies in both governments and corporations, the Chinese theft of personal-identity information of tens of millions of Americans (perhaps including you), decades-long abuses of human beings in the same country, etc.

Priorities?

Quick: how many people do you know who have posted about the lion have ever posted ANYTHING about Robert Mugabe’s brutality toward his *people* right there in Zimbabwe? Any takers? How many can even point out Zimbabwe on a blank world map? [Failure to be able to do so should be an instant disqualifier.] I have seen at least two dozen people on Facebook complaining about that lion–not one of whom has said a single word about what Robert Mugabe has done to his people. Not a single one. And which one really matters more in the big picture?

Do most of the people griping about the lion even know who Mugabe is? If so, they had better because he does fit into this narrative, and firmly.

Mugabe is a brutal, ruthless, banana-republic authoritarian of Zimbabwe whose “elections” were rigged and whose “land reforms” included forced redistribution of land (wealth) to cronies, and all manner of poaching and animal loss. [He even seems to have a taste for lion.]

The resultant economic and wildlife destruction has led directly to the situation where a rich dentist can go kill a popular lion. Did you know that? Yet we cry over the lion far more than over the millions in misery and tens of thousands who have died thanks to that individual. Go ahead, shed a tear for the lion…but then to be strictly proportional, wail in anguished, lengthy screams over the real human beings lost to Mugabe’s evil.

Yet again, who among the lion sympathizers has posted about Mugabe’s brutalities toward people in the same nation? It seems to me that, for far too many, it’s far easier to care about a dead lion than dead people — especially when those people are sub-Saharan Africans. Pathetic.

It’s the bigger-picture issues that matter the most because they affect the most people, simple as that.

If you look at numbers and facts instead of emotional heart-tugging crap, if you are paying attention to how it all ties together, context, big picture, forest from trees, thinking for yourself, and not allowing yourself to be a marionette for the diversionary minutiae spewed by Big Corporate Media, then you are not just looking anymore, but truly seeing. You’re in control of your worldview instead of being controlled.

Too many people get butthurt over tangential crap with heads in sand over what matters more to more people. This lion killing serves as prime example. Sure, think about the lion killing…but truly THINK and analyze in context, with rational, logical, root-cause examinations, and not just react emotionally. The mob justice directed at that dentist will NOT, I repeat NOT solve the animal or more importantly human abuses in Zimbabwe. Massive collective waste of time!

f one has been paying attention, for more than the last several days’ shallow/short-attention-span social-media/Big Corporate Media news cycle, to the problems in Zimbabwe, one realizes the following.

The longstanding human-rights horrors there (including but far from limited to the brutalizations of homosexuals–the left’s favorite victim-class–there) and the land-redistribution policies that lead to this animal poaching have the SAME ROOT SOURCE. To solve either, that root source (Mugabe and his cronies) need to be expunged from power, and replaced with a freely elected, democratically accountable government. We can argue about how to accomplish that solution, but that is the solution to both problems that absolutely, positively, factually, ARE related.

Instead it’s obvious that we seem to care more about one dead lion than thousands of dead Africans (of the same root cause, as seems to escape most people, who as I noted already can’t even locate Zimbabwe on a blank world map).

So the sheeple continue to be led (and distracted) by their day-to-day small-picture heartstrings, and Big Corporate Media and the governments with which it is bedded know this. Hence, the manipulation of the populace proceeds apace…and the big problems (whether this, or the others I noted in the intro) also continue.

Solution: Awaken yourselves and truly think! Look at the issues in an analytic, holistic way in big context instead of reactionary and emotional immediacy. We live in an interconnected world, with interconnected big issues, a world that is far larger than ourselves and our emotions. See it as such. Examine issues from the common denominator of the human condition and the moral vacancies and ethical deprivations therein. Shift from reactionary and emotional to analytic, problem-solving mindset.

Don’t get sidetracked by celebrity tabloid fluff or other vapid, non-nutritive, 10-second attention span crap being fed to the McMasses by the McMedia.