Readers may have two questions regarding my title today. First, you may wonder what is the reference population, “we”. Second, you may ponder what triggers my question. With regard to the second question, you may wonder “what is going on inside the head of the questioner?” These are legitimate questions, which themselves are triggered by the presumably strange nature of the question.
Let us attempt a process of elimination. Are we stones and pebbles? On the face of it, this is insulting, isn’t it? Stones and pebbles have no blood running their veins. Damn it, they don’t even have veins! Why attempt to identify us with them? They don’t hustle as we do. They have no worries as we have. They simply follow the laws of nature without the ability to formulate any of theirs. They have no consciousness and no self-awareness.
But what are trees? Are they sentient or conscious? We are not used to thinking of trees as sentient beings. However, in the last eighty years, scientific research has provided ample evidence that, like animals and humans, trees are super communicators and sentient beings, with intelligence, and the ability to pass information inter-generationally.
You say to me that we are not fish and beast of the water or wild animals in the forest. And I ask, how are you so sure? What do they do that we aren’t capable of doing at a more alarmingly damaging rate? The lions, tigers, and hyenas of this ecosystem of ours can even be exonerated of wrongdoing in the “crime” of cannibalism. They cannot help it because nature doesn’t avail them of alternatives.
Another young woman and her fiancé were returning from their farm. They were ambushed by Fulani kidnappers close to Lanlate. They tried to escape but were out-maneuvered by the hoodlums. The young man was gunned down for daring to escape. The woman was captured, taken to the bush and brutalised until ransom was paid. No one has been found or charged. A young dreamer’s life was cut short.