There are two things that I like about this picture. The most obvious is the reason for taking the picture in the first place. What’s not to like about a picture of a dog biting a cat? But there is more to the picture than meets the eye. For instance, why is the dog biting the cat?
To know the answer to that question, you would have had to be walking the streets of Saigon’s Cong Ly slums on a muggy afternoon in 1971, and see what I saw a split second before this picture was taken.<
What you would have seen is the boy pulling the tail of the dog and the dog doing something that is done every day in military and civilian chains of command.
When someone in higher positions attacks someone below them or messes with them or pisses them off in any way at all, their most common response is to attack the next person below them.
So when the boy pulled the dog’s tail, for whatever reason at all and there doesn’t even have to be a reason for a small boy to pull a dog’s tail, the dog didn’t even have to think twice before biting the cat. The actions of the boy, the dog and the cat pretty much summed up roughly ten thousand years of human history.
The other thing that I like about this photo and I didn’t even notice it until I looked at it a few moments ago is the lady in the upper right hand corner. She’s sweeping the street in front of her little space and could there be anything more futile?
Yet, just as her street is littered beyond hope with garbage, and just as history is littered beyond hope with stories of boys pulling dog’s tails and dogs getting back by biting cats—and worse—so also there are endless tales of individuals going against the grain to try and make a difference.
So here’s to those at the bottom of the food chain whose sacrifice is to accept their lot in life so that’s others can feel better about themselves and those that don’t accept anything because they think, if only but for a moment, that they can make the world a better place.
What a clever way of simplifying thousands of years worth of power struggles amongst men, nations, continents, sides of the equator. Samuel Huntington wrote Clash of Civilizations, a monstrosity that rivals only Steinbeck in overuse of boring detail and he could have saved himself and every History major a lot of sleepless nights and mediocre research papers by saying rather simply, ‘The actions of the boy, the dog and the cat pretty much summed up roughly ten thousand years of human history.’ What a refreshing take on this complicated mess of a world, but a hopeful one at the same time—a credit to your description of the woman surrounded by trash and still bothering to sweep her stoop. What an odd, yet comforting paradox.
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