For hundreds and hundreds of years in European history there never has been a generation free of the most terrible violence that is war.
Before movies and television the culture of violence was propagated generation after generation by children's stories told by their parents and instilled into their subconscious at bedtime.
Today we desperately need different stories for our children, and we can transform these horrid children's tales
Little Red Riding Hood is a sweet innocent child walking through the woods to see her Grandmother. She is stopped on the way by the Big Bad Wolf, and the rest of the story shows how clever the Big Bad Wolf is at getting human flesh to eat. What big eyes - big teeth- you have wolf - All the better to see- to eat - you with.
The hero at the end of the story is the woods man who kills the wolf and cutting the wolf open rescues Little Red Riding Hood, still alive in its belly.
The story is one designed to instil fear into the minds of children.
Wolf represents the world of wild animals -the 'beasts'. Wolf represents the hostile dark world of Nature the 'wilderness' that for centuries European civilization has been waging constant war on to conquer and tame.
Who speaks for a narrative of the wolf that reflects the truth?
The animal rights groups mainly, who governments have listed as terrorists.
This allows the wolf hunting industry to carry on killing wolves for a large profit. Corporate executive holiday hunters pay thousands of dollars for the thrill of killing a wolf. The picture is of two Arctic wolves shot by little red capped thumbs up man with the rifle.
Most people will have heard that wolves do not in fact kill people.
It is vital we gain insight into our acculturation of violence and hostility to the natural world, and indeed the social attitude to wolf has been recently rapidly changing.
How ever we carry on destroying the natural world faster than ever.
David Suzuki decades ago proclaimed our interdependency with Nature, which was giant step forward.
The scientific truth is we humans are the one species most obviously totally dependent on Nature. The fact is Nature has zero dependency on us. One thing that makes us different is that we are dependent on all other species for our survival. The indigenous cultures have always known it and now our science confirms it, but we still fail to see it.
We must learn this lesson fast, because we have made our human species a most critically endangered one by our rabid destruction of every form of life naturally wild.
With escalating atmospheric greenhouse gas pollution now impacting on top of the sixth mass extinction event we are destroying all advanced forms of life.
It is total insanity, and the hall mark of insanity is having no insight into destructive behaviours.
The picture at the top of this blog is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen and I wish I knew who the artist is. It's a Red Riding Hood Mona Lisa.
The image is one of the human helping to nurture the wild. Look at it closely. Here's what I see.
The eyes of the adult wolf are looking at the same time, at the wolf cubs and ahead to the forest where they will live and depend on for their health and survival. The wolf looks confident.
Little Riding Hood and the cubs are looking ahead to rest of the forest. The cubs look content. Little red hood, having the cubs in her basket, shows a sense of nurturing ownership that she shares with the adult wolf. They are the same size in the picture as they would be in real life.
Little Red Hiding Hood's face has a sense of apprehension. She is helping to look after the wolf cubs and that means she must care about the forest. The forests of Europe in her time had already been largely cleared for the advance of Europe's aggressively violent civilization. She knows what wolf cannot know.
Little Riding Hood's fear for the future of the cubs, today should be our fear for the future of our children. We are killing them with what we see as economic development and progress. It is us who is the big bad evil animal.
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