Shooting An Elephant

"Shooting An Elephant" by George Orwell is a powerful essay that was originally published in the compilation "Inside The Whale and Other Essays". It is a tale of ugliness, misunderstanding, alienation, enforced cruelty, and social (if not peer) pressure. 

It is well worth reading on many levels, and is probably relevant even today.

One aspect of peer pressure (in this account) is the effect on a policeman in a hostile environment of the expectations of a hostile populace on the decisions he makes. Either he submits to their expectations or he does not submit.
https://www.litcharts.com/lit/shooting-an-elephant/summary

After re-reading Orwell's essay, it seems to this author that--if a trial in the USA is only a fair trial if the jury is a jury of the defendant's peers-- then any trial of a policeman or policewoman, National Guard officer, Border Patrol officer, or ICE officer is only a fair trial by their peers if the jury consists of other law enforcement personnel... just as there is a separate legal system for the military.

George Orwell makes it clear that he did not want to shoot the elephant, did not consider shooting the elephant to be justified (but it was excusable because the elephant had stomped and skinned a coolie and thereby killed the unfortunate coolie).

The elephant's rage was apparently temporary. 

According to one internet commentator, elephants are deeply afraid of causing harm and possess a noble nature. Allegedly scientists have studied the elephant’s brain and discovered spindle cells—rare neurons also found in humans-- which are said to be associated with self-awareness, empathy, and complex social perception.

Spindle cells are also found in other primates to greater or lesser degrees, particularly Bonobo. Spindle cells are also associated with cancer.

Leonardo da Vinci is credited with the opinion that, “The elephant embodies righteousness, reason, and temperance.”

Before starting a new enterprise, some Hindus are said to pray to Ganesha, the Elephant-headed god of Beginnings, Prosperity, and Wisdom. Ganesha is the patron of intellectuals, authors, bankers, and scribes.

For more on elephants: https://www.britannica.com/animal/elephant-mammal/Reproduction-and-life-cycle

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™

https://www.spacesnark.com/  

https://www.rowenacherry.com

Animal Immortality

Some animals with amazingly long lifespans compared to ours, including one that can survive potentially forever, the "immortal jellyfish":

Animals with the Longest Lifespans

The most incredible is the glass sponge, possibly living up to 15,000 years. Corals and giant barrel sponges are not far behind. Other animals on the list, while impressive, fall within more imaginable ranges, e.g., Greenland sharks (400), ocean quahogs (225), and giant tortoises (possibly up to 250). It's noteworthy that all the most long-lived creatures aside from the bowhead whale (200) are invertebrates or cold-blooded vertebrates. What stops us from attaining such venerable ages? Elephants, at the bottom of the page, have about the same maximum lifespans as humans.

The Wikipedia article on the glass sponge goes into great detail about its biology and ecology but doesn't speculate why it can live so much longer than most animals:

Hexactinellid

"Biological immortality" enables some rare species to avoid aging and thus theoretically live forever. In practice, though, they're not truly deathless, since they can succumb to disease or predators.

Here's a page about the jellyfish with that extraordinary gift:

Immortal Jellyfish

In response to stress, it can hit a "reset button" and revert to its immature polyp stage. The regenerated polyp grows into an adult genetically identical to its previous incarnation. This process of "transdifferentiation," in which "an adult cell, one that is specialized for a particular tissue, can become an entirely different type of specialized cell," is being studied by scientists in search of new ways to "replace cells that have been damaged by disease." Suppose a sapient creature had a similar life cycle? If we did, would we recognize it as a type of "immortality" we'd want? Would memory and learned skills carry over from one phase of the cycle to the next? Bacteria, reproducing by fission, are technically deathless, but if they had individual identities, would that individuality be preserved through their descendants? In musing on the immortal jellyfish, the article raises the question, "If all of an organism’s cells are replaced, is it still the same individual? The genes are the same, of course."

If we consider the issue from that angle, however, almost all the cells in our bodies get replaced throughout a lifetime, too, many of them over and over. Nevertheless, we think of ourselves as the same persons, with continuity of memory, experience, and identity.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt