Fat Cats & The Mother Of All Wars

Phoebe shares a house with me. That tattered, malnourished, abandoned calico kitty of a year ago is now a happy mouser living in the lap of luxury. She went from being dropped off outside a convenience store in the middle of last summer, festering in her own piss and shit, concealed in a box, to somehow magically roaming the woods; stalking moles, voles, and mice with reckless abandon.

Oh, and she gets a little Purina Cat Chow supplement twice a day. And God does she let me know about it. When it is time that is all I hear, and all she is concerned about. Meow! Meow! Meow!

Indeed the absence reconvenes and the lack reasserts itself. It is like a constant battle: the perpetual struggle to offset the reassertion of nothingness. Momentary satisfaction keeps the offensive Army of Lack at bay. Nourishment the best weapon, the first line of defense, the cure for the dis-ease known as lack.

When I feed Phoebe and she gets done with her meal she is quite a peaceful and content cat. A Fat Cat for sure! All of a sudden, where before food was all that was on her mind, she now feels likes playing. She can relax the search and the anticipation of such. She may rest and take a nap. Or she is free to just chill on the porch. That satisfaction provided by a full belly relaxes Phoebe's self-contraction--the one that commences when lack is in the foreground of her experience.

When lack is dominant and nourishment is not at hand, we--all sentient beings--appear to become bitchy, whiny... total complainers and nags! Emptiness has us crying out. Emptiness has us suffering from a deficit. Emptiness compels us to nag the world, to whine about what is not right, to complain till we either drop dead or have the lack appeased. Where there is suffering, there is probably some lack.

Psychoanalysts might say that there is a lack of holding and containment for the child, which is later expressed in a neurotic and anxious stance towards the world-at-large: the child never feels safe, never secure enough, not even as a an adult. Buddhists might say that there is a lack of realization and/or insight, meditative equipoise and/or enlightenment, which is expressed in the unnecessary exacerbation of suffering in realms so near and so vast as to boggle the mind. Politicians say there is a lack of government funding for this or that program--which if funded properly we are told would result in the immediate relief from suffering for innumerable citizens. Lack, and what to do about it.

The single, constant theme is: Lack = suffering: Fullness = contentment.

So why are Americans so bloated and obese? Have we unwittingly taken the aforementioned equation and gone to an extreme with it? Perhaps our unconscious rationale has been something like the following: If fullness = contentment, then more full must = more content. So it should be little wonder why American-culture is so obsessed with stuff and substance and a 'more is better' atttitude. For we are literally in the midst of a War against Lack. People are right now stockpiling money and food and storing grain and acquiring a surplus of everything from shoes to notches on their belt. Why? Because lack constantly reasserts itself; because absence reconvenes; because we are stockpiling munitions so that we can fight the biggest War humanity has ever seen, the Mother of All Wars, the War that has never ended: that War against Lack.