How Sniffing Butts is like Wikileaks

While walking on Queen Street West the other day, my wife and I saw a dog being walked, smelling anything he could get his nose on. He seemed at turns ridiculously happy, then concerned, then annoyed. Depending – I guess – on whatever message the scents he was getting were sending to him.

It struck me that, since we long ago lost the biological need for heightened animalistic senses and behaviours like this to survive, there is something about our evolution in today’s world that drives us to develop devices that do it for us in less time than it would take for us to evolve back to that state.

The impact of social media; ie: the internet, twitter, facebook, etc – can be seen as our own way of extending our own ability to sense, to communicate, to send messages, to inform each other of what’s going on, to keep in touch – with whoever is listening. So, when you click on my facebook wall, you’re catching my scent, and adding your own by clicking ‘like’ or adding a comment.

Your smartphone, then, is simply your own personal electronic dog nose, allowing you to sniff the informational butts and scent markings of your fellow friends, and world at large. That so many of us have these devices speaks volumes to an unconscious desire to connect closer as a species.

Now bear with me. I’m going to connect this brainwave of mine to wikileaks.

Like many of you, I’m not sure where I stand on this, and also why I should care.

I am slowly awakening to the belief that in the Western developed nations, we are generally blinded to what is really going on in the rest of the world by the shopping malls, the products, the bread and circuses and modern-day convenience of the 500-channel universe some of us are lucky (?) enough to live in.

What’s worse is that even when we are not blinded by these things, that comfort makes us complacent. The majority of us – myself included – are being sedated and distracted by our toys and happy meals and not doing what we can do to help change things.

This is why I disagree with the notion that Wikileaks should be silenced.

I think Wikileaks – and the media and news organizations using them as a source of information – are allowing us to sniff the butts of our corporations, military and governments… and we’re not always going to like what we smell… and those organizations sure as hell don’t like us suddenly having all our noses up their backsides.

Wikileaks has everything to do with us – the general public – being given a fuller understanding of what governments, military and corporations do in our name, under the veil of secrecy… and maybe, just maybe… it might shake us out of our matrix of deep-seated complacency, one sleeper at a time?

I am opposed to disclosing information that puts lives in danger, however, in the big picture, how many lives are in danger when certain kinds of information are NOT made public?

Wikileaks is sending a message to those in power and at the helm of corporations:

Every release we do of material has a second message, and that is, we set examples: If you engage in immoral and unjust behaviour, it will be found out. It will be revealed. And you will suffer the consequences. | Julian Assange 

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I’m not sure what ‘the consequences’ are. I don’t have the answer to that, just more questions. And it always worries me when governments tell citizens to stop talking about a specific issue.

After all, aren’t freedom of information and freedom of expression two of the things we like to say our governments and it’s agents stand for? Or, are we only free to know what books Oprah thinks we should read, or how many more children Octomom is having? Do our governments and politicians really stand on higher moral ground than the rest of us in deciding what we can and can’t know?

I don’t think Wikileaks is going to go away. It’s not going to be silenced.

It’s important, because it should open our eyes to what is really going on in the world of international diplomacy, the war on terror, the war on drugs and the lies of the corporate world.

It may become an indispensable looking glass into our civilization, and become an increasingly louder voice asking us to take a look at what we allow our governments, countries, cultures and industry – and us – to continue doing in this world.

And I think that before we discount Assange as a crackpot, let’s take a step back and look at ourselves. Let’s talk about taking our own individual actions into account, about taking steps to stop our own inhumanity to each other, about developing a more pronounced human empathy gene, which is the key to our survival as a species, both spiritually and materially.

So let’s not be bullied into keeping silent about wikileaks – or into letting wikileaks be silenced.

I think Wilileaks is an important, peaceful catalyst for change. Nothing I have found so far indicates the opposite, and for that alone, I want to hear what Wikileaks and Julian Assange have to tell us about ourselves.

This is what the internet is really for.

There’s no ‘delete’ button any more.

Let’s all take a big long whiff.