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Cerebral Veneer

In an earlier post, I reacted to Dennis Kucinich's lawsuit
against a congressional restaurant, when he bit down on an olive pit.
He discovered that it had split his tooth.  He sued the restaurant
for $150,000.  As I said then, "Some tooth!"

What I had been thinking of was what anyone I had known,
while growing up, would have done.  They would have yelped,
and probably had the tooth pulled.  Put their tongue
in the space where there used to be a tooth.  For a while.

I like a lot of things about Dennis Kucinich.  I do not like him
as much as I used to.  Why?  Because we saw what his is like
when he lashed out, almost instinctively, as Carl Sagan might
have explained, when the lizard part of his brain responded;
that is to say, when his emotions got the better of him.

Had he thought about it, he would have known, immediately,
that suing the restaurant for the accidental--not deliberate--
fact that an olive pit somehow showed up in a salad that
probably contained olives was not an act of public treason.
It was an accident.  Things like that happen.

Kucinich and the restaurant have settled matters by the latter
paying Kucinich for his tooth.  Dennis will not say how much
the restaurant paid him.  I wonder why not.  Is it a state secret?

What we really saw was evidence for how we behave
when we do not have time, or take time, to become rational.
We behave emotionally.  We let the lizard part of our brain--
the primitive part of our brain--take over, before we think,
and allow the cerebral cortex to modulate our "instincts".

Dennis Kucinich, we saw, lashed out.  I listened to him, tonight,
on TV, explain rationally about the crack in his tooth, and the
work the dentist had to do, and all that explanatory crap,
but we saw, earlier, something about Dennis, and all of us,
when we react without thinking first.  Any astute political
advisor could have told Kucinich that the lawsuit would make him
look like just another politician with power, or anyone else
with power, lashing out at the innocent mistake of a salad maker.

I think less of Kucinich now than before.  I do so because
to be civilized is to stop and think, to allow what our brains
have become to modulate the lizards within us.  Else we are just
lizards.  Lizards with lawyers.  Even lizards with lawyers who
withdraw their lawsuits and settle out of court look bad.

We are all capable of things like that.  We all do things like that.
It is not becoming, when it happens, even when we cannot afford lawyers.

We carry a lot of our past with us.
Civilization is hard-gained:  a veneer.

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