I know, Billy, it's hard sometimes

We have a feral cat that lives in our neighbourhood who has more or less adopted us. Originally, I figured if we ignored it, it would go away. So I did things like avoiding eye contact. After it had well and truly adopted us, I read in a book about cats that avoiding eye contact actually encourages them, because direct stares are a signal of threat. This is, apparently, why people who are allergic often attract cats – we use our human social signal to ward them off, but they interpret it as a cat social signal of welcoming.

We have named the cat Billy.

I feel bad for Billy. Her family used to live two doors down, but seem to have left and left her behind. We called the humane society, but they said they’d put her down if she wasn’t adopted in three days. She’s surviving, although skinny, so we decided to leave things alone. Billy had a nice meal the other day when she caught a rat that was eating grapes off the neighbour’s vine. She has scratches on her nose, presumably from the cat fight we heard a couple of nights ago. Billy is perpetually sweet, and desperate for pets (or “pats” as they call them here). She is pathetic in both her devotion and overwhelmingly positive response to the slightest physical contact.

When I saw Billy this morning, I heard myself saying, “I know, Billy, it’s hard sometimes.” It just is.

I wish we could talk about this kind of thing more openly in day-to-day life; how life is often hard, how we all have dangerous secrets, how we all have unfulfilled dreams we’re afraid to pursue. In my lecture this morning I was talking about social comparison, and how when people feel threatened, they look for easy targets they can compare themselves to in order to feel better. That is, we pick on people as a sort of grown-up security blanket. This fully explains the Jerry Springer show to my satisfaction – no matter what a loser we feel like, we can always find someone who’s even more of a loser on television to make us feel big again. Of course, for some of us, we watch George Bush instead of Jerry Springer.

But think about the consequences of a whole society quelling its fears by mocking and humiliating each other. Especially now that it’s so easy to do this, not to the faces of real people, but to abstractions of others who we’ve never met personally. So Bill Bennett diverts his attention from having gambled away the family home by figuring that at least he’s not gay. Rush Limbaugh covers the pain with pills, then covers the pills with hatred of anyone who does not resemble his ideal vision of his father.

Try asking yourself who you hate, and why it is you really hate them.

Then ask yourself who you love, and tell them you love them as soon as you can.