We Are All Witches and Warlocks

 Human beings are hope machines. From our first moments to our last breaths, we think, we wonder, we imagine. We dream.

Hope is our magic. Hope flows in our blood, fuels our ambitions, lifts us up when we fall flat. Hope is our modern sorcery.

The essential strength of humanity is that even when it is reduced to only one human, each one of us still carries the embers of hope. That ember smoulders, capable of reigniting the full range of possibilities. It can blaze like a hearth that warms the grandest castle, or it can rage like a forest fire that burns the whole world to ashes. Our intentions direct our power towards creative or destructive purposes, but the ember itself is nearly impossible to extinguish. Even when it goes cold for decades it can flicker back to life without losing its potency.

The achilles heel of our criminal justice system is that it blinds itself to this reality. Prisons do not take into account the fact that this sorcerous spark exists irrespective of a person’s external situation. Hope springs eternal, as they say, and within each human being can be found a bottomless well of the stuff. A wise irrigator would channel that implacable flow towards barren fields that could once more become fertile, rather than dedicating themselves to fruitless efforts to dam up what cannot be contained.

Human beings need no external motivation to feed the ember of hope. In such a self-contained system as the hopeful heart, attempts to quash its nature only engender the development of alternative means by which its visions can be realized. If our prisons abandoned the doomed road of trying to eradicate hope and instead nurtured that vital human spark, we could direct untold energy into positive changes within the world we all share.

Warring against a person’s hopes and dreams achieves nothing save for further alienating them. They become resentful, but no less driven. If we set aside our labels and judgements - if we take off our blinders - it becomes obvious what a dangerous proposition this is for society. We have the opportunity to transform the lost people filling our prisons into allies, builders, and creators. What benefit is there, then, to instead manufacture enemies? Hope is free, but aligning ourselves against it costs us everything.

Society is made up of people, and it is not a zero sum game. When a person behaves in a way that runs counter to society’s interests, they also act against their own interests. If an individual makes law and order, harmony, compassion, and the other pillars of society into foreign concepts, it stands to reason that they’ve decided their interests and society’s no longer coincide. Rather than using their antisocial actions as justification for further tormenting someone already cast out from the warmth and kindness of the healthy, happy, safe, community-centered world we all hold as the ideal, we can move closer to the ideal by using our great collective power to identify the roots of our exile's disillusionment. From there we can lay the groundwork for them to find their way back to wholeness, and home.

Redemption need not be freely given, nor made easy to obtain, but to strip away the essential humanity of another human being is beyond the power of any society, however grand it may be. No matter how far away we send our undesirables, in their mirrors they still see reflections of us. Human feet are driven by hope and will always walk. The ember of hope burns no less bright in the darkness of exile. It behooves us to light a fire for the banished to place on the horizon ahead of them, not the one behind.

Dying of Spite

Imagine you are unwell. Someone calls an ambulance and you are whisked away to the hospital. There you meet your doctor, who takes down your history, gives you a thorough examination, then tells you that the hospital won’t do anything to help you, nor will you be discharged. You can but wait to die.

Ridiculous as such a scenario sounds in a civilized world, it happens every day. We are bearing witness to a mass casualty event and squabbling over pennies, politics, and philosophies while people lay dying underfoot. As they beg for help we bandy rhetoric, debating vague ‘solutions’ too divorced from reality to ever bear fruit. Finally they fall silent, resigned to the only fate we don’t exclude. In the wake of their passing we congratulate ourselves for our wisdom: helping would have been a waste of our precious time. Worse – if we didn’t succeed, we might appear to be fools.

We are the biggest fools on the planet

Human beings are not naturally inclined to quit. When we fall down, we get back up. When a bridge collapses, we rebuild it. When a plane crashes, we don’t forswear flying. Our dauntless species scarcely hesitates to tackle any number of grand challenges, yet when it comes to fixing our prison system we can't give up fast enough. Surrender is our default position the moment incarceration enters the conversation, our hands thrown skyward so long that we’ve lost sight of the thumbs we evolved in order to do what humans do best: effect solutions to our most pressing problems.

Prisons are man made disasters, spanning generations and swallowing millions of lives. Of its many failings, our justice system’s ultimate punishment is the most egregious. Beyond questions of morality, there exists no greater waste than executing someone. To impose the death penalty upon a single person takes decades and costs millions – for zero benefit. Nobody looks back fondly on an execution: “remember when we killed Joe? That was great. Life’s so much better now.” and besides the acute waste, capital punishment carries a grave opportunity cost as well.

What could the person we throw away have done in the half a lifetime it takes for the state to kill them, were we to give them the chance? Thirty years can pass as these cases wind through the torturous appellate process – we can turn a fetus into a brain surgeon in less time. To pretend we are incapable of discerning the roots of a person’s behavior and guiding them back to wholeness in the same span is absurd. But we don’t even try.

And it is not only those we condemn that we are failing. While thousands are living to die on death row, hundreds of thousands are sentenced to lifetimes in prison, dying to live more than the basest existence. Rather than offer them a path towards a positive, productive future, we treat them as if they were lepers. When our prisons operate like doctorless hospitals, what outcome might we reasonably expect? Some lucky few may pull through, but we can take no credit for successes that occur in spite of our best efforts to prevent them.

Hospitals are filled with the sick and injured. Prisons brim with the same, except the wounds tatter hearts and minds. Hospitals hold our society’s most vulnerable members in their care, tasked with returning them to wellness. Prisons are no different, except we root against healing. There is no question that the patients who fill prison wards deliver themselves into their own predicaments. They are not blameless, but that makes them no less ailing. 

Just as the doctor would never withhold treatment from the smoker, the fast food fanatic, or the exercise avers, it is abhorrent to withhold treatment from the people we incarcerate because we resent their antisocial behavior. It is, in fact, monumentally short-sighted to do so when those same people, healed or not, will eventually be ground up and spat out of the system and back into the streets of Anytown, USA to make room for even more shattered souls. Alienated or not, they are coming.

Human beings are the least helpless species on this Earth. With our hands and minds and wills we have accomplished wonders to make even the most strident pessimist crack a smile. Our Homeric failure to fashion a carceral system that does anything but undermine the foundational values of our society, then, is born not from honest trial and error but from a brainless knee-jerk reaction to blame patients for their illnesses.

It’s time to abandon our surrender and start using our thumbs.

CATS ARE DRAGONS

By Ronin Grey




Imagine a creature. Imagine that this creature is a master hunter. Imagine that it is fierce and proud, that it is cunning and patient, that it has the capacity to be roused to terrible fury but for the most part spends its days in a state of grand repose, placid, calm, reflective. Imagine this creature too is not only intelligent, canny and instilled with the wisdom of the ages but that it is also sleek, graceful in its every movement and beautiful in a way that only a exemplar of nature can be.




If your mind tends towards the realms of fantasy, the creature you are picturing may be a dragon. If you take more of a realist's approach to your daydreaming the beast you envision might instead be a cat. What many fail to realize is that these two creatures are one in the same. Supposing you are disinclined to simply take my word for it, allow me to illumine this unconventional position: cats are dragons.




Dragons are often portrayed as devilishly intelligent, far smarter than a mere human. Yet, the skeptic objects, cats are not as smart as humans. True — they are far, far smarter. For proof one need only examine the historical record of species domestication. Humans have spent most of the span of our existence domesticating wild animals in order to gain their cooperation in a variety of endeavors. Dogs help hunters and keep watch for intruders. Cows and pigs provide a stable food supply. Sheep offer their wool to clothe us, horses pull plows, and so on. What purpose, then, do cats serve? Why would early humans go to the great lengths required to domesticate cats if they served no purpose to our daily survival?




The reality, once we look beyond the pride of our species, is obvious. Humans did not domesticate cats. Cats domesticated humans. Like the dragons, cats understand the usefulness of employing capable servitors with opposable thumbs, so they set forth a plan to tame our rowdy breed. Its success has been nothing short of remarkable.

Cats are smarter than humans because humans expended tremendous effort to domesticate many different species to perform many different tasks. Cats harvested the fruits of all our labor in one fell swoop and needed only to domesticate a single species in order to achieve a perpetual leisure state still unmatched by human efforts despite millennia of technological slogging. Witness that upon the vast digital altar humans make daily sacrifices, nothing is more widely adored than cat videos.




Dragons, too, are known for their ability to charm. The magic of dragons is the magic of cats, the bending of lesser minds to their wills, the subtle mastery which never sits so heavy as to provoke rebellion. Again, the skeptic protests: 'I have never seen a cat wave a magic wand, nor perform an arcane invocation, nor even so much as utter a single inscrutable syllable in order to further their mysterious ends!'




While I would be remiss if I didn't point out the visceral reaction a human body experiences to the most magic of all words – meow, a sound pregnant with the promise of impending delight, thus superior to the myriad, guttural vocalizations of the lowly dog – I agree that cats proffer no theatrics. They need none. To understand the nature of cat magic one need merely to pet one. Observe as your fingers begin to stroke the cat's fur the heady sense of peace settling over the mind. This is what it feels like to be bewitched. As you continue to pet the cat, all anxieties gradually become more distant to the entranced mind. All thoughts of doing anything besides petting the cat forever vanish. You may even be lulled to sleep.




Regardless of the intensity of the initial enchantment, the subject of a cat's magic eventually finds themselves compelled to seek the cat's approval in all things. It becomes reasonable to follow the cat around and bear witness to its every idle doing, to feed it according to its own exacting specifications, to provide the cat with every material comfort and even to scoop out 'the box.' Even this ultimate expression of devotion, to the bespelled, seems a small price to pay in exchange for the fluttering in our chest when the cat deigns to notice our presence, to direct towards us its attention, to allow our approach and tolerate our clumsy attempts to amuse it.




This is the most basic form of cat magic, but it is only one of a cat's many means of binding a human to its will. Should further proof be needed, I cite the purr: a far more potent tool for ensuring total compliance. The purring of a cat has been specially attenuated over eons of evolution to bypass all human resistance to its mandate. Once this hypnotic vibration resonates within the hapless target the purr unleashes upon the human mind an emotional payload equivalent to a mother's lullaby and a father's praise. Down to our bones, humans seek both a sense of security and to be acknowledged. This sonic barrage tells us, 'all is well, pet human. You are safe. You are appreciated. Nothing bad will happen so long as you continue to do exactly this.'




The strength of the purr's hold on an individual can be ascertained by the most basic of tests: once you have been enthralled by the purr, attempt to stop petting the cat and recall what you were doing before the cat subverted your attention. Most often the difficulty of such a thing is immense, thus the spell only ends when the cat wills it.




Cats are dragons. They rule the world, but they are benevolent conquerors who do not seek to upset their subjects or throw our lives into chaos. In fact, catocracy desires to usher in the reverse. Cats prefer order and harmony. Observe that petting a cat is calming in the extreme. It promotes good mental health, positive feelings, good self esteem and reduces stress. It is meditative without being indulgent, comforting but not decadent. A cat reminds its human to take time from our busy lives to rest, to breathe, to untangle our minds from the knots we find ourselves in when we forget to anchor ourselves in the present. Cats alleviate depression, loneliness, boredom and cabin fever. They also protect humans from rodents, insects and the premier, perennial housepest: the bird. They promote good hygiene, good sleep and good manners. Their guiding paws offer a model we would do well to emulate, shaping us into better humans without running roughshod over our free will, unlike the modes of authority we endlessly inflict upon ourselves.




Cats are dragons, in the end, because just as dragons in our mythology represent an ultimate, so too do cats embody the very best traits we wish to possess – intelligence, compassion, curiosity, ingenuity, serenity – without any of our so-human emotional baggage. Cats have carved for themselves a simple niche in our complex world that allows them to spend all day every day doing exactly as they please without causing harm to others. That they managed to achieve utopia without ever working a forty hour week, without getting stuck in traffic or standing in line, and with a zero carbon footprint only underscores how much we have yet to learn from their noble example.




Dragons once filled the skies and hoarded all the treasures of the world. Then they realized all they needed to tame us was cuddly fur and a little bit of magic, and forever after humanity belonged to the cats.