"...But Its a Whale of life!"

When I was a kid in Australia, our nearest neighbors,

geographically speaking, were headhunters

(if one were to ignore the aborigines, and in those days almost everybody did).

Probably that's why we as a family never vacationed in Papua New Guinea

where breakfasting on ones enemies was still, for some, a way of life.

 We had immigrated from London where

breakfast was best enjoyed at the Savoy Hotel.

It too, was away of life.

Now before you mistake the

English civility for social conscience please

remember that for three hundred years in Europe it

was a way of life to watch mothers, daughters,sisters and lovers

be burned to death for their healing and spiritual practises. Which is why so

many white women still live in terror of their own

power, cellular memory being what it is.

Generally as we evolve we look at our past as rather barbaric.

We don’t re-introduce worn out traditions.Imagine returning human sacrifice to Hawaii.

Sunday service just would not be the same - besides the tourist industry would suffer.

It was once a way of life for slaves to be auctioned off .

Can you see the farmer'smarket on Wednesday mornings offering

wayward schoolkids for sale along with the organic produce and the tapa cloth?

Or maybe at the swap meet...'buy your housekeeper now and receive a free t-shirt'.

It's once again a way of life in Afghanistan to

stone women for a perceived lack of chastity or even for having a job.

And we western women are challenging that tradition with all our strength,

having fought off the shackles so recently

ourselves.

It's a way of life for loggers to cut down one by one the last remaining ancient trees of America

and sell them for the traditional back porch.  Is yours redwood?

It's a way of life for monofilament fishing nets and fish factories on the ocean to desertify whole

stretches of ocean as big as the USA every year, though I doubt if the tradition has much chance of lasting.

(Hurry the tuna is on special this week - while stocks last).

It is still a way of life for banditos in South America to torture and murder environmentalists

in exchange for drugs or well-laundered american money.

(I won't even mention the CIA - they might be innocent.)

Should we call these 'traditional ethnic cleansing practises' and defend everyone's right to cultural freedom?

Did Hitler claim 'cultural rights' to support his behaviour? Or did he use the line 'scientific

research' to umbrella his atrocities?

Somewhere between these two politically correct phrases, the future of the world cetaceans

hangs in the balance. On the one side, The International Whaling Commission meets annually

to make decisions that try to include reinstating commercial whaling internationally as

the 16 year moratorium is over. From the other side, the US Navy is playing toying with cetacean genocide.

Shall we allow the oceanic mafia to once again hunt our beloved family of

cetaceans to sell them as delicacies on the asian market?

Because traditionally that's what they've always done.

Have you ever seen a whale slaughter?

Have you ever been close to a whale

and had the rather humbling sense that it has as much or more

intelligence per square inch than you do?

So why are the powers that represent us hedging around defending ethnic whaling practises

that are no longer economically, ecologically or ethically viable?

The Makah tribe killed their first grey whale fordecades in 2000,

not with traditional spears and harpoons but with the super weapons of the twenty first century.

They were funded byJapanese corporate money which was spent tobolster 'traditional' whaling.

The entire thing was a ploy to frost the image of murdering whales

a year before the moratorium ended.

No one even eats  grey whale meat - it's considered 'too bitter'.

Japan has justified its continued killing of whales during the past 16 years under the

'scientific research' banner. No doubt  all 33 million dollars that were raised annually by

selling scientifically researched whale meat were

used to do more scientific research...

on more very lucrative

dead whales.

There are six billion humans now living on a planet where too many species go extinct and

thousands of children die of hunger every day.

Our less conscious traditions, if they do any more harm to the biosphere,

are going to wipe us out. For example the tradition of no birth control

espoused by the same church that gave us the tradition of witch burning.

Or unprotected sex as a macho tradition that has spread AIDS to 25 million Africans.

The unconscious traditions that

brought us to this place - that some can get as

rich as they want and watch others of their own

species die of poverty; that we can dominate the

earth for our own ends; that animals are less

important than humans -

these are destructive, outworn belief systems.

They are dangerous to life.

Now our whale friends are under threat again, this

time from both the US Navy with their

anti-submarine warfare toys and from the

multi-national corporations who want their flesh.

Given that whales are an integral part of our

Hawaiian way of life, not to mention our economy,

I suggest that we as a state take their welfare

extremely seriously - whether they are playing in

our local waters or off on their migratory

pathways across the globe.  What use is it for us

to make laws preventing whale watchers from

getting too close to breeding mothers if some

corporate fishing fleet is going to blow them

apart as soon as they leave 'home'?

and farther out to sea the plan is to stage

a heavy metal acoustic torture chamber for marine mammals

touring through 80% of the world's oceans if the US navy gets its way

Mahalo to the Maui County Council for their

unanimous vote to oppose LFA in Hawaiian waters

and mahalo to Congresswoman Patsy Mink for her

continued opposition to LFA. But  with this

renewed commercial threat to the whales, it is

time to make the oceans a world sanctuary for

these extraordinary creatures with the largest

brains  to ever evolve on earth.

May we all honor the ancient traditions so long as

they support life, love and honor, but let's hear

no more nonsense about traditional killing

practises. Let the whaler go the way of the

cannibals and the inquisitors, a shadow in the

dark books of ourstory.

And let us lay

LFASto

rest

!