Cat punching and our bipolar relationship with reality

Word about a new internet phenomenon named 'cat punching' has been going around social media lately. It started with a Facebook Page set up to publicize a Valentine's day "cat punching event", which apparently (I say apparently cause I haven't actually seen it with my own eyes as the page was taken down by Facebook already) showed pictures of a guy holding a cat and looking like he was going to punch it in the face, pictures of dead animals and comments like

"I prefer the full grown cats, honestly, the little ones can't take a punch to save their lives. It's pathetic."

Here's what the news website Mirror had to say about it:

The page was set up to advertise a cat-punching event on Valentines Day and appears to have been opened by Jamie Card, which is the name of a well-known troll known for launching online pranks.

Although the event might be little more than a sick joke, cat lovers took it very seriously.

At one point today, more than 1,000 people signed the petition against cat-punching in just one hour.

Pasted from <http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science/technology/sick-cat-punching-facebook-page-pulled-5133475>

While many arguments on cat punching might be about:

1. Whether or not this 'cat punching event' is a serious proposal
2. If the cat punching implied in the pictures did in fact happen (as opposed to it being an intended 'joke' and the guy just pretending to hit the cat)
3. How sick and cruel it is to joke about and suggest harming animals and post dead pictures of cats on Facebook

...I would more like to draw the attention to the polarity play out that is hiding behind what is essentially people expressing their intense hatred for cats, also on this webpage titled 'things I want to punch in the face: cats' where someone has listed all their reasons for why they hate cats.

So this polarity play-out that I am talking about involves all the hundreds if not thousands of cat videos showing how cute cats are and websites about why cats are absolutely awesome, created by 'cat-lovers'.

 Because on the one hand there is this adoration for cats which shouldn't actually surprise us that on the other hand there are people who are going to 'hate' that which others 'love'.

 After all, isn't that how love and hate work - meaning, hand in hand? Where ever there is love, there is also hate, which actually seem to be the two major experiences that we humans get to choose from when it comes to how we will experience ourselves in this world. 

 It is easy for us to point fingers at the ones who express hate towards things in this world, but we don't seem to be willing to see where the hate originates from in the first place or consider that we might be contributing to the very existence of it by our very participation in its polar opposite, being love. This point of people hating cats, creatures whom are loved by many others, is but one example of this hate-love polarity play-out that exists within each and every one of us.

I am sure that we can all find examples of things that we 'absolutely hate' just because of how other people 'absolutely love' those very things. And the fascinating aspect about this hate experience, is that its very starting point is to in a way function as 'counter-weight' for the 'love' expressed by other people. It's as though we are all in this constant dance with each other trying to balance out the love and hate in this world.

And this is forming quite the problem as you can see exemplified by the cat punching phenomenon, be it real or not - the point is that hate in relation to cats or any other creature in this world shouldn't exist within us in the first place. And, this may come as a shock to many, but neither should love. This because the love and hate polarity that we have been participating in as though it is the very essence of who we are as human beings or the purpose of life is in actuality the very thing that is sabotaging our ability to see things for what they are.

We will either 'love' something or we will 'hate' it, or we're simply indifferent about it because it doesn't fall into these categories, but we never notice or see things as what they are. We rather have this strange tendency to want to categorize everything in our reality into how we prefer to experience ourselves, which is within feelings and emotions, positive and negative internal sensations and reactions and so we fail to recognize that reality in itself is never siding within any of those categories. Reality is just here. A cat is just a cat, it doesn't need us to love or hate it.

 If anything what this world needs is for us to just let it be what it is. We'd still need to take care of it, sure, but taking care of something or someone requires things like attention, consistency, trustworthiness and stability - not love. Love, and consequently hate along with all of our other feelings and emotions which we may want to use to define and label the world that we see around us, is something that is entirely about ourselves and our own want to experience things, to feel things about ourselves, this world, cats, … and basically our reluctance to simply do the things that need to be done to create a world that isn't as dysfunctional as it is currently.

A solution here would be to redefine the word love so that it doesn't end up creating hate. Redefining love can be done  by making sure that our 'love' for cats or any other creature or manifestation in this world isn't just a feeling and a statement anymore. Loving something should imply that you stand as custodian and care-taker and that you take responsibility, which should be an inherent trait of our existence as humans on earth anyways. As long as our 'love' is a feeling, then that 'love' is bipolar and we are in fact causing hate to emerge. So, it's time to stop pointing fingers and to start taking responsibility for what we create.