Saving Whales and Charitable Tax Deductions
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What if the whales don’t want to be saved nor the donations made?
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Once again, a ritual that extends back to the beginning of whales has occurred: one beached itself last week on the southern shore of Long Island.
The animal was emaciated; at 60 feet long, it should have weighed around 60 tons although it weighed only around 30 tons, said Robert DiGiovanni Jr., executive director of the Riverhead Foundation on Long Island, the officially designated marine-mammal rescue group for the region. “It was clearly sick for a very long time,” Mr. DiGiovanni said.
The possible causes of the whale’s death are many, said Allison McHale, a spokeswoman for the National Marine Fisheries Service. It could have contracted any number of viral or bacterial diseases, been struck by a ship, or the animal could have been mortally injured long enough ago that no injuries were visible. Though the whale, whose age and sex were not yet known, would be small for an adult finback, it was also possible that this whale was an adult and lived out its full lifespan – finbacks, the second-biggest whale after blue whales, can live to be 90 years old.
To solve these mysteries, Mr. DiGiovanni’s team will oversee an open-air necropsy in the coming days, in the dunes nearby.
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Picture by Todd Maisel/New YorkDaily News
Breezy Point volunteer firefighter Ed Manley tried to calm the whale. Was it struggling to stay alive or move on to that great Sea World in the sky?
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While whales are beautiful animals, along with every other animal on this planet, the extraordinary steps taken to save it and investigate its death seem…..well….extraordinary. And perhaps the term “unnecessary” also comes to mind, at least when it came to saving the whale.
All of the possibilities mentioned above, and no doubt many others not listed, suggest that this whale went through that integral and unavoidable segment of the life process that every other living entity that has ever existed since the beginning of time, from human being to animal to microbe, has also experienced: it ultimately experienced its mortality.
Why is the human reaction, at least in some quarters, always to intervene and pre-determine that it is not the time for the whale to die? What special information do these sages know that the rest of us don’t?
What if the whale was dying of old age or some terrible disease and it decided to go to a final resting place, a whale hospice of sorts, to live out its final time in this world? Did it deserve to have humans prodding and poking at it in its finals hours as it might have been reflecting on a long, rich life that included a big family (kids graduated from college and have their own pods) as well as all those delicious feasts on crustaceans, krill, squid and fish? Do whales now need a living will to die in peace?
In view of the fact that whales and other animals have been dying for time immemorial and that well over 99% of all species that ever existed were extinct long before humanity came onto the scene (can’t blame the demise of T-Rex on Union Carbide), there is a sense of hubris on those Good Samaritans who think they always know better than nature as to when animals should die.
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One of the great ironies during this fiscal cliff debate, which is effectively centered on taxes and their impact on the economy, is how Liberals are schizophrenic on the subject.
In this debate, President Obama and congressional Democrats are adamant that taxes should not increase for people who have annual income of less than $250,000 per year but are completely untroubled by increasing taxes on people over such threshold who, in large part, hire such lower income taxpayers. Somehow, the poison is fatal to one group but not the other or the rich can afford the antidote or whatever. Good thing these Democrats are not in the medical profession although with Obamacare they effectively are.
This same inconsistency carries over into another Liberal precinct: public radio.
New York City’s public radio station has been hawking their end-of-year pledge drive by selling the idea that people can reduce their tax bills through a donation to them. This is rich stuff as while public radio goes to great lengths to maintain a veneer of non-ideological balance during these cash round-ups, they almost always say in the next breath that they are not part of the “shrill” and “bloviating” media out there; a clear swipe at conservative media in general and conservatives specifically.
And anyone who thinks that a survey of public radio’s staff would not reveal at least 80% of them to be ideologically left of Nancy Pelosi, which clearly must skew their work-product leftward, I’ve got some Greek bonds to sell to you at a premium.
But the dirty little not-so-secret is that no matter how many stories public radio does on corporate greed, the much-maligned “rich”, or those allegedly avaricious bankers (amongst other demons du jour), Liberals have been and always will be as tied to money as the rest of us are, even if they’re unwilling to admit it.
-I.M. Windee
