An Animated Gif To Consider

By Glenn

Though you wouldn't know it from how I conduct myself in a casual/social environment, my professional job involves animated gifs. A technology start-up based in Miami hired me a few weeks ago to find the best and newest "viral" animated gifs on the internet.  We package a few really good ones with a lot of very terrible ones and sell them off again to organizations across the world after they've been given a triple-A rating.  It's like what happened in the financial catastrophe of 2007-2008 but instead of home loans it's gifs of cats, dogs, children, people farting, people falling down, people transitioning into a new gender, someone making a funny face, and bird attacks.  Take a look at the best one I found today:

Why I like this animated gif is the same reason anyone likes watching animals or children abused: you're a future serial killer or you believe in the inherent evil of man/beast.  If all babies and kittens are born as imperfect creatures modeled on an imperfect god, there is something satisfying about watching them punished.  How does this gif make you feel?  Does it make you want to have more children than you currently have?  Does it make you wish to have more cats than you currently have?  Can they coexist together?

I have been this upset at a cat before.  Once when I was a child our family cat clawed up our curtains and another time it drove our family car into one of those portals from Sliders and ended up in another dimension.  Thankfully it was able to slide back after a few months and we hadn't needed to drive anywhere in that time period.  It was still a thoughtless thing to do and I wanted to hit our cat for doing it. But violence only begets more violence.  No one deserves to be hit and when you start carving out reasons why people do you'll only end up hurting someone you love with physical violence.

At the same time this gif also demonstrates the bravery of standing up for yourself.  Attacked in an unprovoked manner, this cat decides to reject the culture of victimhood and instead strike back - showing the baby that there are repercussions for your actions.  With parenting at an all time low, children are sometimes not being taught lessons that if you commit some bad action (hitting, slapping, mortgage fraud) there will be a bad result.  Freud and Erikson always warned that if parents failed to help children grow and reach the next stages of their life cats and cat-like creatures would step in and do so.  I guess they were right.