What do we tell the cats?
Your cat wakes you up at the usual time, meows inquisitively. Is it time for my breakfast yet? You shuffle into the kitchen, open a can of cat food and unceremoniously dump it into her bowl. Bon appétit, kitty. She calmly eats. She doesn’t know. How do we tell her what happened? That things are going to change. That Donald Trump is the president elect of the United States of America. She may wonder, how could you fuck this up, humans? You really elected that guy? Did you read his tweets? And we have to tell her yes. Yes we did and yes we did.
Our cats might be scared of an uncertain future. Will we build a wall on the kitchen counter? Will their freedom be taken away? Will they be deported or persecuted if they don’t belong to the privileged and protected breeds: the ones who know with certainty that their way is right and believe it’s important to impose it upon others? The ones who downvote their youtube videos and refuse to share their memes.
Tell them that you stand by your black and white tuxedo cats, your Siamese and Burmese cats, and those ones with no hair and big ears. Your cats who stay home and sleep while their families go to Church, or while their families go to Temple, or Mosque or the weekly meetup of the Atheist Community of Silicon Valley. We must reassure our cats that we’ll fight for them. We’ll fight for their right to sleep all day, chase paper balls and randomly attack the wall no matter what their ethnic origin is. We’ll fight to ensure that all cats have equal rights to cardboard boxes and protection against cucumbers and bananas. Cats of all shapes, colors and backgrounds are an important part of America and the world.
We’ll tell our cats that not everyone who voted for Trump believes in the discrimination of cats. In fact, many people who voted for Trump did so without any thought as to how it would affect cats. Maybe those people don’t have a cat, or think that cats’ voices don’t matter. Cats’ voices do matter. Those of us that hear their meows will continue to speak for them.
Your cats may wonder, does this mean I won’t have a right to choose which kind of cat food I get anymore? I won’t be able to control what I do with my small fuzzy body? The answer is no. No you won’t, because you never did. You don’t have money. Or opposable thumbs. And you don’t really understand how grocery stores work. So you can’t buy cat food, nor can you open it.
Finally, some of your cats may be asking if they should run away. They may ask if you can move them to Canada, the land of warm hugs and snowflakes. We should encourage them to stay and work hard to better our country. It’s not clear that Canada really wants more cats in the first place. But besides that, if they don’t stay and lay down for love, inclusion, compassion and freedom, who will?
