'If Fish Can Feel Pain, Then Maybe Iraqi Children Can, Too'
by Terry Jones

The recent report by the Royal Society suggesting that fish can feel pain will
come as a severe blow to all those anglers who have hitherto operated on the
principle that fish are incapable of feeling anything. It comes as an even
bigger shock to those of us who have for so long applied the same principle to
human beings.

If fish can feel pain, does this mean that a 13-year-old child, picked up in
Afghanistan, hooded, flown several thousand miles to Cuba and kept in a chicken
coop, may also experience physical sensations bordering on the uncomfortable?

Like Tony Blair, I thought the Guantanamo Bay camp was 'an unsatisfactory
situation', but it never occurred to me that the human beings in there would be
capable of feeling discomfort.

In much the same way, I suppose, George Bush must have assumed that all those
prisoners on death row, whose death sentences he signed as Governor, would never
undergo distress at the prospect of imminent death. Like him I always firmly
believed that human beings were incapable of feeling any unpleasantness.

Otherwise, I used to point out, why would civilized people like Donald Rumsfeld
even contemplate dropping cluster bombs all over the Middle East where kids will
pick them up or tread on them and get blown to pieces or have their legs ripped
off? If fish can feel, there must be a strong possibility that small Iraqi
children will be unhappy at losing bits of their bodies.

If fish can feel, perhaps we should rethink some of our other policies. I mean
maybe it's not such a good idea to dump mentally ill people on the streets in
the hope that some passers-by will give them 'community care'? Just suppose that
- like fish - the mentally ill can feel miserable?

At least there is no suggestion that fish suffer from the cold and wet, so
there's no problem in leaving the mentally ill out on the streets through the
winter, but that's not the point. The point is that we ought to re-examine some
of our long-held and most cherished assumptions.

Like, for example, the idea that being out of work is just something that
happens to some schmucks but has no bearing on their quotient of personal
contentment. If fish can feel, maybe George Bush should be more worried about
the US unemployment rate reaching 6 per cent than about how fabulous it is that
his military can drop so many bombs and fire off so many missiles in such a
short time.

If fish can feel, perhaps Tony Blair should reconsider his support for a US
administration that is publicly pledged to visiting war and destruction on any
other country that dares to oppose them.

If fish can feel, perhaps we ought not to allow the men and women who currently
run the White House to run the world in the way that they clearly intend.

If fish can feel pain, perhaps it's time to govern human affairs on the
principle that human beings feel pain too.

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0504-02.htm

Good luck. I hope you make it,

Malcolm Lawrence
Editor-in-Chief
Babel: The multilingual, multicultural
online journal and community of arts and ideas.
http://www.towerofbabel.com