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🎧 Facing the Noise & Music: Playgrounds for Biophobic Citizens 🏗🌁🗼🏭


Facing the Noise & Music - Playgrounds for Biophobic Citizens

SoundEagle🦅 falls into a deep coma and awakes in a future where cultures and institutions have seemingly been restructured as vehicles of liberation rather than restraint. Instead of wallowing in the modernist legacy of seeing things in strict duality (such as good versus bad, and black versus white) and insisting on the authenticity of experience, many aspects of sociocultural activities are now associated with the pursuit of rampant pleasure and unrestrained enjoyment.
Dystopia?!
Taking the perspective of sociology, philosophical anthropology and cultural history for this journal entry, here is a glimpse of future as witnessed by SoundEagle🦅, a future where social landscape and cultural terrain are (re)engineered to such an extent that memory and history, along with the constituents of the physical world, are largely Lego sets, permutable ingredients and programmable fodders to serve and populate the playgrounds for biophobic citizens.

The tourism, leisure and entertainment industries have supplanted the military and industrial sectors as the foremost industry worldwide. Competing with online social media and other Internet trappings for human attention and patronage, the construction and marketing of museums, theme parks, casinos and other tourist attractions have become all-consuming whilst perpetuating a high level of abstraction and commodification of reality through diversion, fantasy, nostalgia and entertainment.

These industries are symptomatic of a rather nonchalant way of thinking about culture, insofar as the dominant criterion for a good culture is that it exists as a living culture, mutable in every conceivable way rather than fossilized for the sake of authenticity at all costs — for nothing is pure, and all things are more or less hybrids reconstructed, reconstituted, appropriated or simulated in one way or another, as tampered and altered as genetically modified organisms and foods.

Even when accompanied by some educational purposes, these hybridised forms of recreational activities are out-of-place with the roles and purviews of traditional museums, conservatories, national parks, wildlife sanctuaries and scientific expeditions that seek to understand and preserve artefacts, cultures and places of historical or natural value. There is an ongoing dilemma to the extent that competition, funding shortages, financial cutbacks, changing public tastes and waning cultural authority are not only impelling more museums, conservatories, sanctuaries and parks to adopt and experiment with new media and subjects of exhibition, but also exposing them to the danger of being revamped, co-opted, privatised, or even liquidated for alternative uses, land speculation, higher-value investment and redevelopment.

The explosion of tourism, leisure and entertainment in both the physical world and the virtual environment of online media has resulted in the global sanitization of pleasure and the perpetuation of hedonism, where certain values and ideas about human lives are rooted in or benchmarked against the perspective of youths fascinated by toys, juvenilia and pop culture, which are now instituted as the dominant resources in social and personal development.

Whilst playful participation and leisure activity are important agents of socialization that shape identity, behaviour and outlook, their effectiveness is debilitatingly compromised by the disproportionate growth of high-intensity entertainment that emphasises extreme behaviours and lurid spectacles. The imbalances between entertainment and education, and between self-satisfaction and self-improvement have become much more problematic in the technophilic fantasy overlaying the world of games and amusement — a world conspicuously designed to be as engrossing as possible to those whose individualistic worldview tends to be only as large as self-interest and self-centredness permit, and whose craving for amusement, escapism, technological excitement and adolescent anarchic antics finds few objections and restraints in the anthropocentric staging and distorted reading of landscapes and cultures, let alone of animal characters and natural history.

Anthropomorphic stories and images have become the de facto means for objectifying everything for instant gratification and sensory gluttony, entrenching the human race in a cosmology that both forgets and forbids the recognition of limits and otherness, as well as enslaving peoples in a social atmosphere and collective consciousness that see living things as cartoons, animations, animatronics and bionics, all of which betray the prolonged state of insatiable juvenile gratification.

Old age and senior folks are nowhere to be seen, and are supplanted by ‘teen age’, in which exploitation of, and atrocity to, animals, plants and the environment in the name of art, entertainment and cultural (re)production are so pervasive as to become the dominant social climate with universal acceptance.

There is no natural history, no objective past and present. There is only unnatural future, a future that continues to hold the past and present captive, a future that can neither seek a true reflection of the world nor escape from its own entrapments.

Reality is now available in, defined by and lived via a series of potent, fast acting, total recalls of fun, fantasy, romance, adventure and violence. The end of natural human beings and the spread of simulacra and synthetic beings are complete once the full artificialization of human consciousness is achieved with memory implant, artificial intelligence and virtual reality, in which both humanity and the environment are reduced to figments of the collective imagination, wantonly feeding pleasure centres and cerebral G-spots.

Being the only “mature specimen” alive, SoundEagle🦅 is ironically spared the compulsory “rendition” on account of extreme rarity, and is allowed to be preserved for novelty as well as a “living fossil” possessing cultural and biological uniqueness from a bygone era.

Transhuman, Posthuman, Neurotechnology, Neuroengineering, Neural Networks, Neuroscience, Memory Transplant, Augmentation and Reprogramming

Transhuman, Posthuman, Neurotechnology, Neuroengineering, Neural Networks, Neuroscience, Memory Transplant, Human Augmentation and Brain Reprogramming.

 

Submitted as a response to Weekly Writing Challenge: Dystopia!
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54 comments on “🎧 Facing the Noise & Music: Playgrounds for Biophobic Citizens 🏗🌁🗼🏭

  1. I was ready to signup for this new world and then I read:

    “The imbalances between entertainment and education, and between self-satisfaction and self-improvement have become much more problematic in the technophilic fantasy overlaying the world of games and amusement — a world conspicuously designed to be as engrossing as possible to those whose individualistic worldview tends to be only as large as self-interest and self-centredness permit…”

    Point well-taken. Write on, SoundEagle, Write on.

    Liked by 2 people

    • Hi Ben, how have you been? SoundEagle has not heard from you for quite a while, and is delighted by your reply and encouragement here, on the basis and to the extent that you are (re)thinking about not (re)entering the playgrounds for biophobic folks.

      Like

    • I have given your dystopian musings some thought and finally came to the conclusion that a society that contains so much hedonistic sociological ballast will be overrun by the barbarians. When you approach the subject from a historical perspective, that is what has happened with previous bread and games societies. Usually followed by some dark age: it’s a cyclical pattern.

      Liked by 1 person

  2. […] Facing the Noise & Music: Playgrounds for Biophobic Citizens | SoundEagle […]

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  3. You too, my friend.

    Liked by 1 person

  4. I think that is one of the so much important information for me. And i am glad studying your article. But wanna observation on some common issues, The web site taste is perfect, the articles is truly excellent : D. Excellent process, cheers

    Liked by 2 people

  5. Isaac Asimov would be impressed. Both with setting and writing.

    Liked by 2 people

    • Thank you very much for such a high commendation, Carl. It would indeed be a special honour if the late Asimov could be alive to review both the setting and writing. Happy springtime to you and your family in March!

      Liked by 1 person

  6. Reblogged this on The Sand County and commented:
    I highly recommend this essay. I find that many of the cultural activities and the desire to preserve our practices in perpetuity, which Soundeagle is writing about, is a subject which has arisen not only in my own thinking about our world, but also in my own historical-philosophical research.

    Liked by 2 people

    • Thank you, Jeremy, for reblogging the post to alert people of our mutual research interests.

      SoundEagle has been very occupied with errands and caretaking duties lately, and will attempt to return to the blogosphere as soon as possible. At the moment, only short visits are possible.

      Like

  7. It is ironic that we want to preserve our practices in perpetuity and yet we are producing a wasteful, destructive, synaptic culture with little memory for anything beyond the ability to seize upon temporary sensory experience as authentic. A modern/post-modern nightmare indeed. Naturally, a culture of the simulacra is a more easily policed, commodified and segmented culture. Science fiction writers have long been imagining dystopias where our senses are “managed” by remote control. Whenever I walk down the street and see virtually every person with their head down in an eye phone I can’t help but imagine this myself.

    From an historian’s perspective, what I find so interesting about this subject is how the obsession with history that occupied the nineteenth century philosophers and twentieth century totalitarians has been replaced by another form of totalitarianism: the manipulation of the body as a machine. I think there is a rather logical progression from a view of history as coming to an end and a world that is completely managed for the supposed bliss of its human residents or the maximized profit of its masters (who are themselves fettered by their machines). There are countless ways of looking at this problem, but I especially like your very thought-provoking and creative exercise in using sound, music, and pleasure grounds as a field for envisioning a “freer” and more natural and biological world where a wild “floraison” is still possible.

    I think a project which envisions a world without policed experiences is an important exercise in preserving our humanity and demonstrating our compassion for other life in our world.

    Liked by 1 person

    • Thank you very much for your detailed, thoughtful and highly pertinent comments! SoundEagle can’t agree with Jeremy more.

      We can also identify the cosmetic and fitness craze as being similarly problematic and wasteful to the extent that if or when millions of fashion lovers, beauty queens, gym junkies, bodybuilders and exercise devotees could transfer some or all of their time, energy and resources that they routinely lavish on their bodies to more important, pressing and/or farsighted engagements such as gardening, weeding, growing crops, greening and/or protecting the environment, participating in communal activities and local projects to increase local or regional health and sufficiency, then they can still be physically active, healthy and simultaneously contributing to their societies and environments, instead of being largely individualistic, if not narcissistic, in their pursuit of beautiful or fit bodies to conform to some social norms, and/or to achieve fame or success in competitions through training, ingestion, injection, surgery and even gene-therapy.

      Perhaps one day nobody needs to worry about beauty and fitness anymore if genetic engineering can make everybody beautiful and healthy. And then more, if not all, humans can worry about and devote themselves to other things . . . . . Wishful thinking???

      SoundEagle recently appended a new paragraph to the post:

      Being the only “mature specimen” alive, SoundEagle is ironically spared the compulsory “rendition” on account of extreme rarity, and is allowed to be preserved for novelty as well as a “living fossil” possessing cultural and biological uniqueness from a bygone era.

      Also added another image, which concerns Transhuman, Posthuman, Neurotechnology, Neuroengineering, Neural Networks, Neuroscience, Memory Transplant, Augmentation and Reprogramming.

      Like

  8. Hi SoundEagle!
    Thanks for stopping by. You outdid yourself on this one. It always good to read that mature specimen got saved; especially in our quick to discard others world.
    Kudos! 🙂
    Eliz

    Liked by 2 people

    • Hi, Ms Elizabeth Obih-Frank! Thank you for appreciating SoundEagle‘s eventual survival, against all odds, as a mature specimen to boldly face the noise and music in the playgrounds of biophobic citizens. The logic or premise is that the survival is necessary in the futuristic scenario for SoundEagle to have observed its citizens and surroundings, and subsequently logged this very journal entry as a warning to posthumanity gained and a eulogy to humanity lost.

      Like

  9. A thoughtful cultural analysis on the narcissism of our times.
    Ah the fitness fetish of the middle classes-jogging, power walking, straining away at expensive and pointless instruments of “exercise”. Why don’t they just do some actual work?

    Liked by 2 people

  10. Very insightful. Have you ever read Yuga:an anatony of our fate by marty glass? A good read, I think you might enjoy.

    Liked by 2 people

  11. […] SoundEagle falls into a deep coma and awakes in a future where cultures and institutions have seemingly been restructured as vehicles of liberation rather than restraint.  […]

    Liked by 1 person

  12. […] Facing the Noise & Music: Playgrounds for Biophobic Citizens […]

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  13. Very interesting read. Though I wonder if this is truly the future, or just an unmasked version of the now. Trans-humanistic tendencies have only enhanced the velocity in which we find that crossroads between entertainment and education. Edutainment, the wave of the future!

    Liked by 2 people

    • Hi Joshua, thank you for your comment. Given the severity of the situations being described, this post is definitely painting a futuristic scenario, and the trajectory towards that future seems to be well on the way at many parts of the world.

      There are ongoing and new issues (apart from benefits) in entertainment and education as well as edutainment, and some of these issues are going to be even more pronounced and/or intractable further along the trajectory.

      Like

  14. Challenged with “dystopia” you plunged write in.

    Liked by 2 people

  15. […] 🎧 Facing the Noise & Music: Playgrounds for Biophobic Citizens 🏗🌁🗼🏭 (soundeagle.wordpress.com) […]

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  16. This was a very intriguing read. You’re very intelligent and I look forward to more of your work. ✌🏽

    Liked by 2 people

  17. Very interesting. Did you ever see the movie from the 1970s, “Logan’s Run?” Everyone had fun and, in essence, were killed off at the age of the 30. Yet, when Logan escaped the bubble city, he came upon an old man. A living fossil as you say. Your futuristic story reminded me of that movie.

    Liked by 2 people

  18. The military-industrial complex is alive and well in the US. It’s where most of our taxes go. A focus on aggressive life-ending technology, rather than areas that would improve life, like the preservation of the natural world, education, arts, healthcare, community, and yes, entertainment and leisure. I think you hit the nail on the head when attributing technology with the frenetic pace and demand for instant gratification experienced in our civilization. Ultimately these aren’t healthy for anyone or for the planet. I hope in the future that the pendulum will swing in the other direction and people will start reclaiming a slower, gentler life.

    Liked by 2 people

  19. OOOOH! That is indeed a Dystopian tale! I very much hope that never happens but I acknowledge that the world is dramatically changing. Great writing.

    Liked by 1 person

  20. Used my laptop this time… Post loaded fine. 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

  21. […] via 🎧 Facing the Noise & Music: Playgrounds for Biophobic Citizens 🏗🌁🗼🏭 […]

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  22. Sadly, what you describe as a fictional dystopia is becoming a reality.

    Liked by 2 people

  23. Quote: “Old age and senior folks are nowhere to be seen, and are supplanted by ‘teen age’, in which exploitation of, and atrocity to, animals, plants and the environment in the name of art, entertainment and cultural (re)production are so pervasive as to become the dominant social climate with universal acceptance.”
    An excellent expose of these times. I think, based mostly on observation, that the species as a whole has come to a dead end, refusing to grow up any longer. This is much more than a bump on the road of evolution – it is the sign of the end for homo sapiens. I think that was inevitable in any case as the species as a whole has always considered its natural environment as its enemy and dealt with it accordingly. Now that technology has made it possible to throw a veneer over reality and to exist in a civilization bubble having less and less natural connection to the environment, the species has fallen into its own coma from which it will never awaken. When its life-support systems collapse, so will civilization and that will be that.

    Liked by 1 person

  24. This hyperfocus on entertainment seems to me an attempt to escape reality. We all, of course, need rest and recuperation from time to time. Our society, however, is consumed w/ it. Not a moment is left unfilled w/ distraction. We teach our children to crave constant sights and sounds. But inspiration (and God, Himself) are often found in solitude. Thank you for raising such a profound issue, SoundEagle. Your posts and pages are always thought provoking.

    Liked by 2 people

  25. great isight and post SoundEagle❣️🌷

    Liked by 1 person

  26. You have made some truly profound observations here, SoundEagle. I fear that we are moving irrevocably in this direction. The old are being shunted aside, along their values (values which anchored mankind for eons). Instead, we are consumed w/ a culture that worships youth, materialism, technology, and change for its own sake. Whether we recognize it or not, this is self-destructive.

    Liked by 2 people

  27. An interesting imagined future, SoundEagle. As alternative potential futures, I have explored a distant one in my novella ‘The Methuselah Strain’ and a much closer one (10 years hence) in my latest novel, ‘An Excess Of…’ Both envisage to some extent the preponderance of hedonistic activity, though this is much more evident in the shorter work. For anyone interested, both can be found here: https://stuartaken.net/my-published-work/science-fiction/

    Liked by 2 people

  28. You have a wealth of thoughts, information and reflections in your good post and I could say a lot about almost every one of the sentences, but that’s beyond the scope. I try different.

    Culture is of course a phenomenon that is subject to constant influences and changes accordingly. Evaluating them is always dependent on the current level of education, information, sensitivity and more.

    But, at least from my point of view, all cultures have always had a philosophical concept that focuses on 3 questions: #1 Where do I come from? #2 Who am I (or what am I here for)? And, #3 Where will I go at the end. Religions as well as natural sciences try to offer models for this. But all of this presupposes the willingness of the individual to find out about it and to reflect on it.

    Now we live in a time of the capitalist world order that draws full attention to #2. This point is the only one that makes big money. However, the fact that #1 and #3 are largely excluded leads to “uprooting2” and a lack of prospects at the same time. What remains is a disoriented crowd, which is therefore only looking for its identity in material values. (Where else should she be able to find them?) And because that can never work, a permanent feeling of lack remains, which one tries to compensate with more and more consumption, fun and an exaggerated ego.

    Influencers then take over the part that the advertising doesn’t manage and tell us where we have to go on vacation and which handbags and sun glasses we need to buy to be cool.

    Since this is not a permanent solution either, we create a metaverse in which we can revive the game again. But by the time Tom and Jane look around, the strategically important areas have already been occupied by the big players.

    Liked by 2 people

    • Dear Friedrich Zettl 狐胡

      This constitutes a substantial, thoughtful and reasoned response that you have indulged SoundEagle🦅, who would like to reciprocate by quoting the following passages from a special post entitled “SoundEagle🦅 in Best Moment Award from Moment Matters🕰”:

      Living in the moment can have far more urgency and currency nowadays, given that the pace of population growth, social change, technological succession, information explosion and content oversaturation has caused everything to be even more likely to be cramped out of existence and to recede into the past, into oblivion, into irrelevance, into historical junkyards. Whereas data used to be most commonly sorted alphabetically or relationally, nowadays reverse chronological sorting has taken centre stage insofar as much of our lives is becoming a mediated reality in which the most recent information is listed first and given the highest priority or visibility. Nowhere is such privileging of the newest most glaringly adopted and thus saturating our daily lives than the news feeds and status updates in social media. Consequently, older information is often beyond easy reach or archived separately, accessible only via persistent scrolling downwards or through specific searches with keywords or dates, assuming that one could remember them or knew what to look for in the first place.

      Paralleling hectic news cycles and incessant social media updates is the domain of academics and sciences, in which specialized scholars and researchers blindingly hone their skillsets on pinpointing minutiae to outshine others in their respective microniches via the latest breakthroughs, techniques and discoveries, often involving pushing or testing temporal, financial, social, ethical and/or environmental boundaries assertively, if not irrevocably or calamitously. Gone are the big narratives and grand syntheses, unless those involved have the time, fortitude and resources to become mavericks pursuing truly revolutionary research or going against prevailing trends to wield long and meandering strokes on the large canvass of a book, let alone a multi-chapter magnum opus. The celebrated stars and their newest games in town manifesting as fashionable trends and eye-opening gadgets propped up by a potent mix, convergence or confluence of marketing strategy, intellectual property and artificial intelligence often shine all too briefly as they are inexorably eclipsed or replaced by the next big things, most of which are in turn destined for desuetude, outmodedness or unfashionableness, and thus heading towards elimination or extinction. In the world of works, ideas, narratives and identities, it would seem that authors have to contend with, or even build in, obsolescence in their stories, characters and creations, if not their very own career aspirations, trajectories and mobilities, insofar as life is a stage, and increasingly a stage occupied with fast moving act(or)s and rapidly changing scene(rie)s, which are themselves progressively augmented, audited or even supplanted by automatons and automations as well as simulations and assimilations, such that real-life is evermore lived through or captured by digital (re)presentations and virtual (re)creations, as exemplified by those populating the vast edifices of social media and online worlds, particularly Second Life, a computer-based simulated environment, where altered identities thrive in alternative realities. The concept of, and the condition for, a job for life, or even a profession for life, are becoming progressively strained, if not antediluvian, as automations and technologies replace more sections of both the blue- and white-collar domains, increasing the volatility of both the job market and individual careers. If the pace and amplitude of change were to continue, there would be considerable doubt as to how human beings, especially those who are the most unprepared, unsupported, affected, disrupted, disadvantaged or disenfranchised, would ever possess the emotional stamina and economic buffer to withstand and weather a life of constant flux and shifting reality. Whilst those who subscribe to technoutopianism would be inclined to believe or assert that automations and technologies are “neutral” because they are merely “tools” whose impacts depend on their users, they would be foolhardy and myopic to deny or ignore that automations and technologies are not only like “words” reflecting people’s narratives, needs, desires, pursuits and worldviews, but also like “swords” with double edges capable of cutting both ways, often resulting in unforeseen or unintended consequences that can be profound, far-reaching or even irreversible. After all, such “tools” and their creation, auditing and maintenance are not always the natural outcome, inevitable result or preordained progress of scientific advances. They are frequently the dynamic reflection and interplay of sociopolitical (f)actors and choices, rather than just objective products, rational outputs and efficient outcomes of technologies, especially when:

      • Ecosystemic principles, human rights principles and democratic decision-making are deficient or ignored.
      • Market logic or neoliberalism is consistently allowed to prevail at the expense of human rights and autonomy to the detriment of liberty, sociocultural capital and ecosystemic integrity.
      • Artificial intelligence systems cause unforeseen repercussions or engage in biases and discriminations to the detriment of equality, diversity and sustainability.
      • Analytics, algorithms and outputs of artificial intelligence replicate or exacerbate biases in extant data and policies, or entrench inbuilt forms of discrimination, corruption or malversation.
      • The technology industry is controlled by market-driven definitions of efficiency and skewed towards (re)producing gadgets and services for the affluent and powerful at the expense of taking full account of the humanity and catering for all and sundry, particularly the most vulnerable, disadvantaged or impoverished.
      Yours sincerely,Rose Greeting
      ܓSoundEagle🦅

      Liked by 2 people

  29. “…a future where cultures and institutions have seemingly been restructured as vehicles of liberation rather than restraint.” Thanks. I am going to toy with this phrase for a while. Like variations on a theme, this is a great verbal beat to build some melody, harmony, timbre, dynamics, texture, and form on.

    Liked by 2 people

    • Dear Joe

      What a musically rich metaphor you have conjured up! Two months and one week have passed. How far along are you in building your variations on a theme based on the “great verbal beat” that you have identified here?

      Should you need some sonic inspirations for your variations on a theme, then please enjoy two of the 35 arrangements of “Tammy”, a popular tune nominated for the 1957 Oscar for Best Original Song after making its debut in the 1957 romantic comedy film Tammy and the Bachelor, starring Debbie Reynolds. Each of the 35 arrangements in the project was performed as a separate musical genre. The process can be likened to the formal technique of theme and variations used by many classical and later composers, except that each variation of the theme is in an entirely different musical genre. The project was more or less completed in November 2004. As shown in the sleeve note below, the resulting 35 variations were recorded onto two compact discs for instant playback.

      The CD sleeve note showing SoundEagle’s 35 Variations on Tammy

      The CD sleeve note showing SoundEagle🦅’s 35 Variations on Tammy

      Please note that in sticking to one of the rigorous parameters of the project, SoundEagle🦅 had purposely used only the first four lines of the tune (corresponding to the first 16 bars of the melody) as the source material for those variations.

      The first 16 bars of Tammy

      The first 16 bars of Tammy

      Which do you prefer, the Caribbean version of “Tammy” or the hard rock version of “Tammy”?

      Rose Greeting

      Yours sincerely,
      ܓSoundEagle🦅

      Liked by 1 person

  30. The set-up of this story (a person who awakens in a very different future) reminds me of HG Wells’ “When The Sleeper Wakes”, although your story develops in a totally different direction.
    You don’t define “biophobic” within the story, so I assume it means “phobia of life”?
    I find interesting how this future world as well as its history consists of changeable ingredients and has no objective past. That reminds me of the world in “1984”.
    The future world that you portray seems to be a very hedonistic world that values pleasure and escapism above all. I think that these tendencies are already present in our world, although they are not as openly and unashamedly expressed in our world. i.e. In our world working and the earning of money are still seen as important and honourable pursuits that endow a person with respectability and status quo, whereas someone who just seeks pleasure and escapism is not be seen as a respectable and serious citizen in our society.
    “where certain values and ideas about human lives are rooted in or benchmarked against the perspective of youths” Again, I think that this tendency is also already present in our world, whereby it is the young who are celebrated and pandered to, in particular in the areas of fashion, music and entertainment while older people and old age in general are shunned and scorned. Just look at the preponderance of cosmetic surgery and people denying their real age and trying to artificially overcome the effects of ageing. But in our world this tendency is not as blatant and as out-in-open as in the future world that you portray.
    It is sad to read of further exploitation and denigration of animals in your future, as one would hope that in the future there would be a shift in collective consciousness and the sacredness of all life, human and animal, would be recognised.

    Liked by 2 people

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