Quotes with shelters

Inspirational quotes with shelters.

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When animals make a stupid mistake, you laugh at them. A cat misjudges a leap. A dog looks overly quizzical about a simple object. These are funny things. But when a person doesn’t understand something, if they miscalculate and hit the brakes too late, blame is assigned. They are stupid. They are wrong. Teachers and cops are there to sort it out, with a trail of paperwork to illustrate the stupidity. The faults. The evidence and incidents of these things. We have entire systems in place to help decide who is what. Sometimes the systems don’t work. Families spend their weekend afternoons at animal shelters, even when they’re not looking for a pet. They come to see the unwanted and unloved. The cats and dogs who don’t understand why they are these things. They are petted and combed, walked and fed, cooed over and kissed. Then they go back in their cages and sometimes tears are shed. Fuzzy faces peering through bars can be unbearable for many. Change the face to a human one and the reaction changes. The reason why is because people should know better. But our logic is skewed in this respect. A dog that bites is a dead dog. First day at the shelter and I already saw one put to sleep, which in itself is a misleading phrase. Sleep implies that you have the option of waking up. Once their bodies pass unconsciousness to something deeper where systems start to fail, they revolt a little bit, put up a fight on a molecular level. They kick. They cry. They don’t want to go. And this happens because their jaws closed over a human hand, ever so briefly. Maybe even just the once. But people, they get chances. They get the benefit of the doubt. Even though they have the higher logic functioning and they knew when they did it THEY KNEW it was a bad thing.

There were six hundred thousand Indian troops in Kashmir but the pogrom of the pandits was not prevented, why was that. Three and a half lakhsof human beings arrived in Jammu as displaced persons and for many months the government did not provide shelters or relief or even registertheir names, why was that. When the government finally built camps it only allowed for six thousand families to remain in the state, dispersing theothers around the country where they would be invisible and impotent, why was that. The camps at Purkhoo, Muthi, Mishriwallah, Nagrota were builton the banks and beds of nullahas, dry seasonal waterways, and when the water came the camps were flooded, why was that. The ministers of thegovernment made speeches about ethnic cleansing but the civil servants wrote one another memos saying that the pandits were simply internalmigrants whose displacement had been self-imposed, why was that. The tents provided for the refugees to live in were often uninspected andleaking and the monsoon rains came through, why was that. When the one-room tenements called ORTs were built to replace the tents they tooleaked profusely, why was that. There was one bathroom per three hundred persons in many camps why was that and the medical dispensarieslacked basic first-aid materials why was that and thousands of the displaced died because of inadequate food and shelter why was that maybe fivethousand deaths because of intense heat and humidity because of snake bites and gastroenteritis and dengue fever and stress diabetes andkidney ailments and tuberculosis and psychoneurosis and there was not a single health survey conducted by the government why was that and thepandits of Kashmir were left to rot in their slum camps, to rot while the army and the insurgency fought over the bloodied and broken valley, todream of return, to die while dreaming of return, to die after the dream of return died so that they could not even die dreaming of it, why was that whywas that why was that why was that why was that.



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