The precursor to winter is fall, and it’s at this time, after animals have spent the summer putting on fat for winter that they are hunted. Moose season in New Brunswick started this week. It’s only a week long, and non-tribal hunters must enter a lottery to get a tag. Hunters also seek out ducks, deer, bear, and any number of smaller game like rabbits and grouse.
The planters are all working together on the same block this week in an area, specifically off limits to hunters. Many wear hunter orange, just in cases. I was told that it’s been many years since the last hunting accident in the province. That observation hasn’t stopped Rebecca and I from joining the sartorial norm for the week.
We’ve had more visitors at our camp recently. Random hunters on quads ride i to our camp daily, much to Rebecca’s vociferous objection. I usually step into view, in the door of my kitchen trailer in a power stance feet spread apart, hands on my hips. When the uninvited come, I don’t call Rebecca off; instead, I give a nod and a wave that clearly says, “Hi there, Fuck Off.”
I’ve been thinking about judgement a lot lately. There’s having judgement, that which we use to make decisions good or poor, and then there’s passing judgement. Ice been accused of the latter in the past. I try very hard not to be judgemental, that is until someone starts judging me. Then, I try to understand their motivation.
Being judgemental, it seems, has multiple motivations. Some pass judgment as a defense mechanism. Putting a person on the defensive is a good way to distract them from paying immediate attention to the person in front of them or to what that person might be doing. I theorize that the motivation in this case is insecurity. Maybe it’s an overcompensation. This type of judgement, I believe, is also used offensively by schemers to keep their mark off balance.
Another motivation for passing judgment in my opinion, is absolution. In this case a judgment must be passed to justify a notion or act. This type of judgement is what leads to rationalization of both the extreme and the heinous, where the judgement is used as a way to demean or dehumanize. If a thing or person is made to be less than, then treating them as such is deemed acceptable.
It would be easy for me to pass judgment over glamping hunters, who may be more interested in the rack than the meat they harvest. But I have to remember that no one is without fault, particularly as I lay in my truckbed, tapping words into a handheld device. We all rationalize what we do, one way or the other.
Beyond Clarity 