I opened my window tonight- since the weather’s beginning to steer back to the nicer parts of the year- and about like 2 am-ish I heard some cat moan outside of my room.  Hearing something like this, in the secluded civilization we live in, is kindof a suburban taboo.  You associate it with some crowded and underfunded part of some anonymous town that’s too in debt to keep the street clean of their furry companions wayward cousins.  The noise forced me to stop the nonsense homework i was doing and try to listen, to evaluate, what’s going on maybe 30 feet and a floor down from my window.  It made me think: why is it was so unnatural to hear this animal outside, what gives me the right to be so pretentious as to put my focus of the cat’s cries.  Just as in Chet Raymo’s “A Measure of Restraint”, unchecked municipal advancement is unchecked and existentially creates a divide between us and nature-  just like that “what separates us from the animals” cliche.  There’s this any progress is good progress mentality that exists in society.  Maybe the safety and detachment of civil housing isn’t the best example of this, but the way we have isolated ourselves, like a giant “F you” to mother nature, is shockingly opaque.  Raymo warns about aesthetic advancement and consumer culture.  Who’s to say that the housing industry isn't like the radioactive toothpaste?  In our venture into bigger houses and cheap plastic we essentially kill the environment and then build walls around ourselves so we don’t have to listen to the pathetic screeches of the animals outside ourselves. I'm not calling for some primitivist return to nomadic culture since this just some random thoughts written down at like 3 am on some mediocre blog, I'm just trying to raise something i don't think is thought about in the society we live in.