Harambe
The year 2016 was filled to the brim with strange and unfortunate events throughout the leap year. The presidential elections were in full swing, climate change was at the forefront of everyone’s minds, and movies such as Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad hit theaters. All in all, it was a bad year. But the worst part—and what many see as the beginning of humanity's downward spiral—was the killing of a gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo on May 28th, 2016.
It all started on a brisk Saturday when a three-year-old crawled over the side of Harambe’s enclosure into the moat below. Harambe, one of three gorillas in the enclosure, approached to investigate the child. As onlookers often do, they began screaming, causing Harambe to become agitated and disoriented. Harambe then dragged and propped up the boy on dry land, arguably with more care than the parents who let the boy wander off in the first place. With Harambe’s fate—and, apparently, humanity’s—on the line, the zookeepers decided to shoot the gorilla, sealing both species' destinies.
He was just seventeen years old.
What followed was a meme firestorm, igniting outrage and cultural shock for everyone with a cell phone. The reason for such an explosion? The already dreadful year that had unfolded and the even more troubling one that lay ahead.
His death set a precedent for the coming age—an era of turmoil and strife that has left us as a mere shadow of our former human glory. Doesn’t everyone feel the anxiety that followed his death? As if there’s a clock ticking down to our ultimate demise? That clock started when Harambe’s life was taken.
There’s an almost morbid fascination with the way we made memes about Harambe’s death, blaming the three-year-old more than we cared about the well-being of our species. Even today, memes surface about the grown-up child, challenging him for causing the timeline shift. Has the child realized the chain reaction of events that occurred since he fell into that gorilla pen? He alone wandered through the thick shrubbery into Harambe’s moat, under the watchful eyes of his guardians, and caused the gorilla to react, trying to help the young boy.
Harambe was no mere 400-pound silverback gorilla. No, Harambe was us—shot in his own home, his kingdom, by those who had trapped him there. He was confused and cornered, with no way out of the situation he found himself in.
We can only hope that in some parallel universe, Harambe is alive and well, knowing deep down that whatever transpired in ours was never his fault.
9/21/24, c.pyle