North Star Writers Group

When I arrived in the city where I have resided since 1981, my new veterinarian warned me to keep my cat indoors. Too many city cars were a threat to kitties, he said.

I didn’t pay heed. I had allowed my feisty two-year-old feline supervisor to go outside since the day I adopted her, which had already brought her close to death and assorted injuries. But she yowled incessantly when she wasn’t allowed to roam freely and I yielded to her commands.

One afternoon I was doing laundry when I saw a cat run over by a truck in the alley behind the apartment building. While the crushed animal’s body jerked in a macabre dance of death, I rushed in for a close look, horrified that it was my cat because it had similar markings.

It wasn’t. I spotted my pet rolling heedlessly in the dirt several yards away. I scooped her up in my arms, brought her inside my apartment, and never let her out again.

By witnessing a small tragedy, I finally learned the importance of protecting my pet.

A news report about recreational sand holes causing more beach deaths than shark bites brought back this sad memory. A father-son team of physicians, in a letter published in The New England Journal of Medicine, counted 31 sand-collapse deaths in Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States and New Zealand since 1985.

The Associated Press story then quotes a woman whose own family suffered a hole-collapse trauma. Mavis Gauruder of Fort Mill, S.C., talks about coming upon a father and son who were digging a hole. “I asked them to fill in the hole,” Ms. Gauruder tells the AP. “They did, but they looked at me like I was interfering.”

She was interfering, even with the best of motives. She had every right to share her family’s tale with the father and son and to advise them, as my veterinarian did me, to reconsider their actions. She did not have the right, however, to insist that they alter their behavior.

In other words, she rushed in foolishly where angels fear to tread. And, as is all too common and certainly in Ms. Gauruder’s case, such good intentions do not earn the appreciation of those on the receiving end. (Iraq is a much larger stage on which this same precept is playing out, with horrendously deadly consequences.)

Are people simply ungrateful jerks? That may well be part of the explanation. But it’s also the case that well-meaning fools violate others’ free will by demanding – often through legislative fiat (or military invasion) – that others benefit from their experience.

We cannot benefit, however, unless we so choose. Even in human form, the spirits that we are insist on free will, which then opens us to the possibility of making unwise or imprudent decisions. We make so many of these that the world is full of seemingly senseless and/or undeserved tragedy and pain.

In consequence, many conclude that either God is a myth or exists and does not care about mere human beings. If there really were a loving supreme being, surely s/he would do something about all this sorrow and suffering.

God, however, is not inclined to rush into places the angels avoid. Our creator has given us intuition and logic plus the free will to put it all to good use. The fact that we are incapable of learning by example and insist on personally experiencing the consequences of our decisions is the best argument I can think of in favor of reincarnation. One life cannot possibly instill us with true wisdom or prudence.

My belief in multiple lives is also why the mendacity and bloodlust of the Bush administration may infuriate me on an almost daily basis, but never causes me to lose hope entirely. We really do reap the consequences of what we sow, even if it takes more than one lifetime to come to pass. Mr. Bush better hope he lives to a ripe old age.

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