Her name is Minerva

This standard poodle's name is Minerva, and if there were a Goddess of Wisdom, it should look like her. Human beings have little experience of wisdom*. Dog Minerva does not obliterate masses of other beings. She might chase a rodent or a cat, might even bite a person she thought was going to harm her loved one, but she wouldn’t kill thousands of people and whatever crickets, tree frogs, and chickens lived near them. Only humans do that. 

Dogs don’t form nation states to justify killing others who they decide have no right to be in that nation-state. Dogs don’t trap people behind walls, bomb them, and then shoot them when they leave their shelter in search of food. Dogs don’t buy six houses and forty yachts while others of their kind never have a safe place to sleep; don’t abduct people of a certain skin-tone and imprison them in concentration camps because they lack a piece of paper.

Granted, dogs don't build libraries or medical schools, don't write symphonies or poems. But the people who do those beautiful things can't seem to stop other people from destroying the very planet we live on. The capacity for greed and violence can trump the capacity for beauty and kindness. 

Tookie sent me a fourteen-minute video of Patti Smith talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the 80th anniversary; Patti Smith saying please, can we STOP harming? Can we take a look at what we’re doing, and stop? Tookie and I think that's such a good idea. I think Minerva would also support it.

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* Goddess Minerva was also a warrior of sorts,  but for the sake of this blip, I'm not going there.