An interview with two dogs on human frailty

So we get to the end of the year, once again, with all of our human achievements and failures, wars on terrorism that never end, the side effects of the consumer society, the financial crisis that takes money from the poor and gives it to the rich, the credit card mentality. Some 1,286 fatalities among the invaders of Afghanistan, 4,427 in Iraq (maybe 655,000 deaths among the victims of the invasion) and defense budgets soaring while unemployment staggers...

While meditating on the state of human affairs, I came across two dogs resting on someone’s door step. They nicely volunteered to give their opinions concerning the human condition...

"Hello. I wonder if I could ask you a question," I asked the biggest of the two, a remarkable human looking animal.

"Go ahead," he barked, "no problem." 

"Well, do you think humans will ever stop fighting?"

"Ha! Ha! what a silly question! Of course not. It’s their nature. We fight over females sometimes, or over a bone, but you fight to get oil or gold or factories or just because you  don’t like the way some guy dresses."

The other dog, quite inferior in size, justed smirked a bit and then wagging its tail gently added:

"The trouble with you guys is that you think you can ignore nature."

"What do you mean?" I asked rather startled, "Don’t we have flower gardens and parks and don’t we make our houses out of wood?"

Both dogs exchanged glances, as if to say ’here we have another ignorant human being.’ Then they both growled:

"Yea, you have nice gardens but you dirty up the air with carbon dioxide and you spray the fields with noxious chemicals, you invent atomic bombs to kill each other, or use pilotless planes to smash people's houses to smithereens, people you’ve put arbitarily into the category of enemies, you do use anti-biotics instead of nature's own cures, and you fill the oceans with oil spills...all in the name of progress or democracy or who knows what ever other sweet phrase..."

That curt reply left me speechless. How could dogs, supposedly man’s best friends, be so critical? I seemed to have suffered a momentary loss of my human sense of self esteem and lacked the faintest idea on how to  proceed. While in that dubious mood, the big dog jumped up and pulled his head off. He was a young man! A man! And he had said those nasty things about our precious consumer society! My God! My world seemed to crash and fall to bits.

The other dog, the one that seemed to be so sweet, sitting there to one side, also discarded his mask: it was a girl! As sweet looking as my first love. I opened my mouth in an attempt to say something, but the words just fluttered around on the end of my tongue.

"¡Basta de guerra!" they shouted in a strange language. "¡Que viva la Pachamama!"

I realized that the interview was over, that there was nothing else to say, and so I darted as fast as my brand name walking shoes would carry me and collapsed in front of the editor’s desk.

"What’s wrong with you? Did you get the interview?"

"Yes...no...the thing is they weren’t dogs, they were radicals, anti-consumer society agitators, and they spoke in a strange foreign language."

"What did they say?"

"Basta de guerra! And that we were exploiting nature!"

"Really? That’s a scoop! Write it up for the morning edition!"