Humans are Horrible

I'm so bummed about the whaling vote victory for Japan. It doesn't mean they can return to commercial whale hunting yet, but this certainly puts them on the path. How anyone can kill a whale when you've seen them up close is astonishing to me. When the whale swam beneath our boat on the first whale watching trip we ever did, it was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. The other thing that bothers me about Japan's gung-ho attitude about a return to commercial whaling is that they already have a glut of whale meat. They use some loophole about whaling for research as a guise for gathering whale meat. However, it turns out whale meat actually doesn't taste too good and the young folks don't like it. They were trying to come up with tasty little whale meat meals to feed the kids at schools who were turning their noses up at it. Yet another reason I despise the excuse of "tradition" in defense of anything. Sometimes you're clinging so hard to the idea that it must remain that way because of tradition that you miss that maybe it wasn't the best thing to begin with, or that times have changed and perhaps it's time for you to change too.

Then, we were watching 60 Minutes (which I stopped watching because I get so angry at stuff like this segment) and they have this show about sharks and they talked about the way that some countries, China in particular, harvest shark fins. I've known about this, but it hits home when you see the footage: they cut the fin off the live shark, then dump the live shark back in the water to let it sink to its death. All so that people can eat shark fin soup. It's one thing to kill an animal for food. I understand that. It's an entirely different ballpark when your conscience allows you to kill the animal in an inhumane manner when you clearly have the capability and capacity to do otherwise. It's also so disturbing that they kill an entire shark for one item. Reminds me of the early days of America when we whites came over and killed the buffalo and just let them rot. You'd think humans would have learned some lesson from that by now.

We just finished watching Treasure Hunters. It was OK. Not great. Definitely not as good as The Amazing Race. They have a pastor and his family on there. Any true Christian should be deeply bothered that this man is representing that faith on the show. He would have done better to just lie about his profession and ask for forgiveness for that sin. In the first show alone he stole a clue from another team, ignored his daughter while she said her thumb was broken in pursuit of the clue, and refused to help out another team even though that team would have likely remained behind them - all in the name of a game and winning some money. Way to put out some good vibes for your religion!

All this just leads me back to my original position that humans are just horrible, horrible beings. Hey, at least I don't have to stress about global warming or avian flu or anything else that could very well wipe us off the planet: we really do deserve it.