Sometimes, you need to step away from event to truly understand the gravity of your actions. Sometimes, you need a little time and separation from a situation in order to examine it properly. At times, you could be “caught up in the moment”, and you judgment may be clouded, your reason muddled, and that is why looking back on events, when you are in a better frame of mind is so important. Sometimes when you look back on an event, you might ask yourself, “What the hell was I thinking?”

By now, you might be under the impression that this post is about relationships. Well… at first, when I considered the subject of self-examinations, relationships did immediately come to mind. I thought about one of my personal moments of clarity when I left a particularly poor relationship.

Did Michael Vick have a moment of clarity or did the arms of the law just encircle him? Now, I’m not going to preach on the ills of animal abuse, nor am I going to lambaste black athletes for bad public behavior. You can find plenty of sources out there for each if you want, so there no need for my own personal spin on those themes. What confuses me is why a moment of clarity did not come earlier.

One account, mentioned in the indictment is the construction of a “rape stand”. Since the pit bulls are raised to be as aggressive as possible, female pit bulls will not submit to male attention. Therefore, owners must build a contraption to hold the female in place while the male has his way.

If the words, “Hey fellas, come over here and help me build a rape stand,” ever leave my mouth, I would like to think that I would stop and review what I just said… carefully. If I ever say, “We gotta’ get this dog on the rape stand,” I would like to think that I would consider myself in need of some serious psychiatric attention. At some moments in life, it is important to step outside yourself and to examine a situation, almost like in a movie, with a camera suspended high above, a God’s view, and take stock of what you are doing or saying. You don’t need to be a PETA member to know that there is something tragically wrong with those statements. I don’t give a damn how gully, grimey, or ghetto your upbringing may be, some things are just wrong. It’s not very difficult to understand that building a rape stand, that seeing a need for a rape stand is wrong.

The funniest part of this entire sordid drama, is the fact that the animal abuse charges are not what may land Vick in prison. Consider the Virginia penalties for animal abuse and these other cases of people convicted for animal abuse:

Man sets dog on fire
Dog Shot and Killed
Puppy Beaten during robbery