Imagine you’re a three-year old little boy and your mother takes you to the zoo and you see a big animal on the other side of the fence. Your mother would probably say you shouldn’t go over there on the other side of that fence, but you’re a little boy. You don’t see any danger in it. Besides, you want to go over there and see that big animal.

You want an adventure. You’re little. Adventure is the name of the game.

Imagine then that your adventure turns out to be more than you bargained for. Instead of you just crawling under a fence and getting back to your mom unhurt and unscathed you are grabbed, mauled almost, lifted out of your skin almost, and find yourself in the hands of an animal—huge, untamed, unbridled.

Somehow the name of the adventure game got changed before it was even over and instead of it merely being an impulse a three-year-old acted on, it became a life and death struggle.

Imagine that’s what everybody standing around thought as they stood horrified at the specter of a monstrously huge wild animal running over and picking up a tiny, defenseless child.

Look! Oh, my God!

It’s easy for us to sit in our chairs and read about this situation on social media or to watch it on the news and to say this or that thing should have happened. It’s easy to see with that famous hindsight how it could have gone “better” and how the parents were at fault for not keeping control of the child and how the zoo was wrong to have killed the gorilla.

It’s so easy.

It’s not so easy when you’re there and in the blink of an eye everything changes from a calm afternoon at the zoo into what could be a killing zone. It’s not so easy when you realize that within seconds a child could be torn to shreds before your eyes.

No. It’s not so easy then at all.

Had that been my child I would have wanted anything—anything—to be done to make that gorilla drop my child. Had that been my child the gorilla’s life wouldn’t have been worth anything to me. I would have wanted an immediate, irreversible, resolution and would have wanted my child out of the hands of that gorilla. Now. I would have been grateful for exactly what happened to have happened.

This I know.

Humans have built zoos in which they cage animals so that humans can walk around gawking and “appreciating” them.

Then one day, a child, seeking adventure, crawls under a fence in one of those zoos and an event occurs that no one would have wanted ever to occur.

And the first thing that takes place is blame.

Blame aside, however, the story of the three-year-old and the gorilla is a story that cries out for compassion—compassion not only for the gorilla, but for all the others involved as well: the child who was traumatized, the mother who was desperate, the zoo-keepers who were faced with the unthinkable and even for those of us who build and support the concept of zoos in the first place.

Truth is, in our humanness, we are all complicit in some way, if not in the event itself, for some part of it.

Things happen. We make mistakes and all too often when we do, we rush to judge. As Ram Dass says, however, “When the mind judges it holds back the heart.”

What if we didn’t hold back our hearts?

There are perhaps a lot of mistakes in the event of the gorilla and the little boy. A lot of things that could have been done differently. But they happened as they did. Polarizing our response to it won’t undo what was done, it won’t even prevent it from happening again.

In the end, healing and change occur when we come together and realize that what happens is not as important as how we respond to it.

“Let’s trade in all our judging for appreciating. Let’s lay down our righteousness and just be together.”

― Ram Dass

~

Author: Carmelene Siani

Image: Video Still

Editor: Travis May