Catzilla Sez ... "Speak Out!" Oct 97 - Oct 98 Essays ~ Pawprints and Purrs, Inc.

"Those who cannot think for themselves are emotionally unequipped to spend time alone." ~ Anonymous

October, 1998 Beyond HTML
...Or, what you really need to know to start a website.

"Ahhh...the internet. Can't live with it, can't jump through the modem and kick the crap out of the idiots roaming freely on the other end." ~ JL Guidry, Web Developer of Our House Productions

The fact of internet life is this: there are nice, sane people out there, but they aren't the ones doing most of the talking. If you put up a website stating that your favorite color is purple, you will eventually see all of the following in your in-box:

A badly-spelled, self-righteous email punctuated with cuss words and exclamation points, stating that everyone knows green is a better color than purple and since you don't agree, you must be a a f****** b*****!!!!
An email from an anti-abortion group member asking why you don't devote your time to saving innocent lives instead of promoting the color purple.
Confused email from people who think your website is about the book The Color Purple, who want to know why you don't mention any of the characters.
Email from a member of the Right Wing stating that if red, white and blue isn't good enough for you, you should go live in one of those communist countries; from the Left Wing asking why you're not giving more exposure to puce, and a Libertarian who feels that there are already too many pages devoted to purple on the internet and this must be stopped right now.
A heart-rending, tear-stained email from someone who can't use your website because she's colorblind and she feels really hurt that you discriminated against her like this.
A snippy email from a nine-year-old who thinks your website isn't very high tech or very interesting, and why don't you have more stuff like cheat codes for video games.
A death threat from a group called "Pink or Die."
A friendly 3,000-word essay from someone who loves purple too and is so glad to have found a soul mate at last, asking you to send them a photo of yourself in a bikini or better yet, without one.
An email full of legal mumbo-jumbo from an attorney representing the Crayola company, demanding that you comply with copyright law and remove the word "purple" from your website.
A terse email from someone who has a purple ribbon campaign called All Against Censorship, threatening to sue you for cheapening their message by using their ribbon color for such frivolous purposes.

At first, you will try to actually answer these emails in a rational, friendly manner. ("Dear Mad-as-hell, I didn't intend to insult those of you who prefer green, I was merely stating my own color preference. If you think about it you'll realize there's no reason we can't each prefer a different color and still be friendly.") But after a few replies along the lines of "How dare you tell me what to think, you ******* *****?", you'll abandon personal replies and put up a F.A.Q. page instead. At first the F.A.Q. section will be polite.

Q. Why are you discriminating against the colorblind?
A. I'm sorry, it wasn't my intention to discriminate against the colorblind. Please forgive me.

But when that generates even more hate mail, the FAQs gets pithier.

Q. Why don't you devote your website to saving innocent lives instead of this stupid color preference? You're one of those evil pro-choice people aren't you? I hope you get blowed up.
A. Why don't you take your stupid little terrorist ass to one of the many, many websites devoted to saving innocent lives and leave mine the hell alone - this site has nothing to do with abortion, it's about my favorite color, you cretin.

And that's when (at long last) all the nice people come all out of the woodwork:

"Why are you so snotty and mean on your website? I used to go there all the time to enjoy reading about my favorite color purple but now all I see is a bunch of nasty insults to the people who visit your page. This isn't very nice of you!"

That's when you realize that you only have two real choices:

You can ignore the crazy people and carry on as if they didn't exist, so that anyone truly interested in the color purple can read about it without getting dragged into a cyber fistfight, or
You can change the name of your website to Let's All Brawl Over Purple and concede defeat to the logic-challenged.

Because in this crazy w.w.w., even idiots know how to get online and they have more time to exasperate you than you have to reason with them.

September, 1998 Fruitcakes and Animals

Those of us who run websites designed to help animals have to take a lot of abuse from fruitcakes, and this is aimed at them.

The fruitcakes figure that there are a million better ways we could spend our time, such as by helping them promote their particular interest. "How dare you waste a 35-cent can of food on a cat when there are so many real problems in the world," they say. "If you don't visit my website and support missing children instead, you're just plain evil."

Well, let me answer you fruitcakes once and for all. (In particular, let me answer the latest fruitcake who decided to attack my site - you know who you are.) Here's why we feel perfectly justified helping animals even though there are many, many other worthy causes to support: because animals are at the back of the line for everyone's mercy, and YOU are the absolute proof of the truth of that.

If a child is missing in your community, the entire community will rally to help find that child: searches will be organized, flyers will be posted, radio stations will broadcast pleas for help, money will be donated for a reward. BUT... If you have 200 stray cats in your community, this same caring and concerned bunch of helpful citizens will start talking about rifles and poison bait. Maybe one or two people will try to solve this problem humanely, but the same community that turned out in force for the missing child won't have five minutes or five dollars to spare for a problem that they created themselves by not neutering their pets.

The one or two people trying to rally help for the stray cats will not only have to do it alone, they'll have to take a lot of crap from people like you - people who claim to be slaving away on the behalf of missing children 24 hours a day but who inexplicably have plenty of free time to waste composing mean-spirited, self-righteous letters to someone whose only crime is empathy. In the time it took you to write your nasty letter, you could have written both of your Senators and asked for stronger anti-cruelty laws -- you wouldn't have deprived missing children of any of your time (since you evidently had it to waste) and you would have promoted kindness instead of doing your level best to spew more poison into this world.

August, 1998 Time for a New Campaign

There is a purple ribbon campaign on the internet for the following causes:

An end to violence
Against domestic abuse
An end to animal cruelty
Horse Aid
Draconic equality
Online Freedom of Fun and Diversion
Pagan Awareness Week
Practice in Partnership with your Health Care Provider
Support the Aboa Camarilla
Stop Spam
Artists Against Racism
Cancer Awareness
Support your Local Mug
Support Paula Jones
Against Internet Piracy
(Found on the Ribbon Campaigns on the Net website.)

The purpose of a ribbon campaign is to create awareness, and back when the campaigns didn't outnumber the available colors this was pretty effective. But I think it's time to admit that the sheer volume of campaigns vs. a limited palette has resulted in more confusion than conscious-raising. It's no use calling your ribbon amethyst or misty lavender or rose-violet, nobody is going to make that kind of distinction outside of interior decorators and the people who write the copy for Victoria's Secret catalogues. We need something new.

So, because I have nothing better to do than dream up half-baked ideas like this, I propose the Wear Odd Socks for Animals campaign. If you wear odd socks people are bound to comment, and this gives you an excellent chance to talk about the campaign your odd socks represent. It also promotes recycling - at last there's something you can do with all those unmatched socks your dryer keeps spitting out. And unlike ribbon campaigns, this isn't based on a color - so two years down the road you won't have to switch to something else, like odd earrings or odd shoes. (Some other cause will be stuck with those.) So get out that bag of mismatched socks you've been saving" in case the other one turns up" and make a statement against cruelty!

Note: Today I received the most upbuilding email I've received in months and months regarding my animal welfare efforts. The author has granted permission to post it below. Thank you, dear Brian...you've made my day - nah, my entire week!

From: Brian
Subject: odd socks
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 1998 01:20:24 -0400

Hello Susie and family (human and kitties). Brian from Canada here. I have been meaning to compliment you on your "Catzilla" pages. They are very informative, up to date and always interesting. I stopped by today for my first visit in a little while and came across this fantastic idea. Personally I have been wearing mismatched socks for years so you can imagine how pleased I was to discover this was not only a fashion statement, but I have also been doing this for a good cause.

As far as the ribbons go, one of my cats ate one about a year and a thousand dollars in vet bills ago, so I am all for socks. I used to work as a waiter. My boss would send you home if you did not have dark socks, so I'd wear a dark one and a white one. Depending on if I felt like working late or getting home early, I would purposely expose and lift my right or left pant leg.

Well, this is probably the longest conversation I've ever had about footwear, so I will end the sock talk by thanking you once again for such an excellent idea. Thank you from me, my cats and all of the animals. You do great work! Don't ever give up, we can all make a difference.

Kind Regards and Purrs,
Brian, Clea and Nikki (Susie here again - Brian belongs to his cats, Clea and Nikki)

July, 1998 Burning Animals vs. Burning the Flag

As you probably know, the newest waste of time for our politicians is an attempt to make flag burning illegal. The two most popular catch phrases associated with this campaign are:

Our veterans didn't die defending this flag just so that people could burn it.
If you don't like this country why don't you move somewhere else.

Our protective laws for animals allow someone to set them on fire and walk away with a few weeks of community service, but our politicians are more interested in stopping the millions upon millions of flag-burning incidents that occur each day. (I'm sure you saw at least thirty of them on the way to work this morning, right? I don't know how the flag factories are keeping up with the demand, myself.)

So why can't we get our politicians as interested in the real problem of animal cruelty as they are in this imaginary flag-burning crisis? Paul Harvey said it best: because animals don't vote. And that's what this whole flag-burning nonsense is about - votes, nothing else. This topic rallies votes because it bypasses our brains and aims straight for our emotions. These catch phrases are designed to work us into such a patriotic lather that we won't notice they don't make any sense.

"Our veterans didn't die defending this flag just so that people could burn it."

Our veterans fought to protect what our flag stands for, including our Constitutional rights - which includes the right to burn the flag in protest.

When you throw away a Constitutional right in order to protect a symbol of that right, you have got hold of the wrong end of the stick. If you let that happen then it doesn't matter whether every man, woman and child is burning flags around the clock, because the flag won't stand for anything besides the staggering gullibility of the American people.

"If you don't like this country why don't you move somewhere else."

Here is what this country would be like if all those patriotic souls who wail "America - love it or leave it" had had their way - because the people who protested these things would all have moved somewhere else instead of doing something about it:

We would still own slaves.
Women would not have the right to vote.
We would still be burning so-called witches in public.
McCarthyites would still be conducting their version of a witch hunt.

Get the picture? Okay, now that we've settled that, could you loopy politicians please get back to something that matters?

July, 1998 No, I'm not trying to set your pets free. Sigh.

Note: This Eastburn person is no longer with About.com.

An About.com site run by Bill Eastburn quotes text from extreme lunatic-fringe animal rights groups, and then implies that sites like mine are part of their conspiracy to free domestic animals. He wants you to believe that I have a hidden agenda: to take your pets away from you. These scare tactics are worthy of the most vicious political campaigns I've ever seen - and I'm from Louisiana, the state with a looooong colorful, politically corrupt campaign and elected official history - but Eastburn doesn't stop there. He goes on to insult other aspects of animal welfare sites.

Quoting Eastburn: "Do you want to be led like mindless herd animals to all those sites with petitions to 'sign' and sob stories, some totally fabricated? Or do you want to see a more balanced approach?" Eastburn claims he's a cat lover, yet he describes cruelty cases as "sob stories," and he sneers at the people who demanded justice for victims like Olivia and Scruffy, calling them a "mindless herd." He makes the baseless accusation that some of these stories are "totally fabricated" in spite of the fact that all of them have been covered in the newspapers and on TV. And his "more balanced" approach is to describe an imaginary conspiracy to take away your pets.

I expect this kind of drivel from the cretins who torture animals, not from a cat site on About.com - which supposedly offers up "the best of the net." If this is the best of the net, who needs About.com? I can find the wacko sites all by myself, thank you very much.

July, 1998 What's next - a Jerry's Kids Cockfight?

The Make-A-Wish Foundation grants some bloodthirsty sick kid's desire to kill a bear, Boys' Town conducts horrible experimentation on cats, St. Jude holds an annual (canned) raccoon hunt fundraiser ("a day of compassion"), and now this:

According to an article in the Las Vegas Sun, Girl Scouts have obtained a license to kill geese. Evidently the Girl Scouts' Camp Woodhaven has become the home of about 70 pesky geese. (Imagine that - geese, right out there in the wilderness. How dare they?) These geese poop in the pond and on the beach and this is very inconvenient for the Girl Scouts - and only inconvenient, since there is no known human health hazard from goose poop in waterways according to the Fish and Wildlife Services. SO, the Girl Scouts have been granted permission to shoot the geese. The article didn't say whether the Girl Scouts will be pumping lead themselves or hiring someone else to take the geese out, and it didn't mention what will become of the goose carcasses. (Maybe they'll use them to make sit-upons.)

The Coalition to Protect Canada Geese, of Oshkosh, Wisconsin opposes this action, and good luck to them. History has shown that people get more steamed up about organizations that slow down traffic by collecting money at intersections than they do about organizations that terrorize wildlife in the name of some high moral goal. I expect that the general consensus will be, "Awwww, let the poor little Girl Scouts have a poop-free pond." Eventually some moron will use the phrase, "It's about time we put humans first," which was the rallying cry of the pro-St. Jude hunt people - although nobody has ever produced a single scrap of evidence showing humans to be in second place. Nor will they.

Hunting for food is one thing, but eradicating wildlife from its own turf just because it's inconveniencing your so-called wilderness experience is, in a single word, stupid. It seems to me that if the Girl Scouts of America can't enjoy the wilderness unless it's free of wildlife and its by-products, they ought to move their activities to the nearest mall.

One thing anyway - I won't have to buy another box of those damn cookies. I expect the NRA will be picking up their tab from now on.

June, 1998 Animal Activists

For some reason, people apologize when they object to animal cruelty. "I'm not an activist," they'll say "but burning an animal to death is wrong. Mind you, I'm not one of those animal-rights nuts, and I don't think that animals are better than people or any fruitcake idea like that - but it's wrong to torture animals."

Please everyone - we need to stop apologizing for being sane. Of course cruelty is wrong. It's not a sign of mental illness to object to cruelty - it's a sign of mental illness to inflict it. Prefacing an objection to cruelty with "I'm not an activist" is like prefacing an objection to wife-beating with "I'm not a feminist." This is not a special-interest cause, it's simple human decency. And since when does that need an apology?

May, 1998 Bear with me to the end of this, please.

There are two commercials on TV right now that use violence to sell a product. In the first commercial, a bulb of garlic asks the guy to "Pick me, pick me!" and then the garlic is cleaved and scorched (responding "Ouch that stings," etc.) until it's finally put on a pizza. In the second commercial, a couple of weeds that have been sprayed with weedkiller do a very realistic and frankly gruesome impression of someone being poisoned. That commercial closes with a hoarse voice croaking, "I can't feel my feet! I can't feel my feet!" while the voiceover intones "No mercy."

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. They're plants. But we wonder why we have such a violent society, and then we laugh at commercials that (even if they are about plants) take just way too much glee in suffering.

The people who dream up these commercials want them to appeal to us. They aim for a tone or a note that has been demographically, statistically, or psychologically demonstrated to appeal to us. Evidently, the concensus is: we love torture and death throes, so if you want to sell pizza, use violence.

But make the violence politically correct - cleaving and torching the chef might sell even more pizza, but some lone voice of reason is bound to complain. Violence to a bulb of garlic though ... only a lunatic would object to that. But this lunatic maintains that using torture as a cute and funny theme to sell merchandise makes a chilling statement about us as a nation.

October, 1997 Lost Cause...NOT

People often tell you that they won't take action "because it's a lost cause," but if all the people who said that would take a leap of faith and act anyway, few causes would be lost.

When people laid yards and yards of flowers in front of Buckingham Palace, their solidarity forced a Queen to break protocol for the first time in history and lower her flag out of respect to Princess Diana. One flower wouldn't have done it, but a huge mass of "lone" flowers did. Can you doubt the power of action in the face of that?

History is full of lost causes that got found by enough people. Anna Sewell wrote Black Beauty in an attempt to educate Britain about the animal abuses taking place in their country at the time. I'm sure someone told her this was a lost cause. They were wrong. And the United Kingdom is now one of the most animal-enlightened places on the planet.

Ending slavery was considered a lost cause. A unified Germany - another lost cause. Women voting, that was a certain lost cause - even a ludicrous cause. Men literally laughed in the face of that one.

If a cause is lost, you can be sure that it's the people saying "why bother" who are losing it.