MEOW

I was digging for topics, and so I put up to facebook a request, with the promise that whatever I was given I would proceed to write a blog post about.

Naturally, I got LOLcats. An interesting quandary, because how, exactly, do you talk about something that is, by its very nature, so trivial and meaningless?

LOLcats, have in some strange ways, changed our national narrative on the feline species. When I was young, I remember distinctly (or perhaps it was just me), people divided very solidly into “cats” and “dogs” people. If you liked one, you hated the other. It was like being on two sides of a very dug in football rivalry; it was almost unthinkable to cross the picket line and join the other side. Certainly, I was very much a dog person: I despised cats, considered them evil, and secretly wondered when they might rise up and overthrow the world.

Sometime around the point the Internet started putting cats on everything, that dialogue began to change. These days, it’s not only perfectly acceptable but probably the norm to love cats AND dogs. I was resistant to this change at first, holding out for the unassailable superiority of dogs (DOGS RULE, CATS DROOL), but one hilarious and poorly captioned image after another began to wear down my defenses to the point that I now find cats adorable, fluffy, and hilarious like everybody else.

Of course, there’s an alternate possibility: that the two events were not related at all (correlation does not equal causation and all that jazz). At about the same time, many of the women I dug were very much cat people, and in college setting, where dogs were actively discouraged, cats were the only pet available. As a result, I was around them a lot more. They say you broaden your horizons when you live in a new place and travel; you’re exposed to your deepest stereotypes, and find them breaking down over and over again. Maybe this effect happened in an odd arena: with the classic cats and dogs war.

On the other hand, society in general has grown in many ways much less divisive (our politics aside) and more open to new ideas and alternative lifestyles. Maybe as a result of the general trend to accepting the merits of virtually everything, cats have come along for the ride.

I’m not saying I understand why, but whatever the case, it has certainly become more true. The long standing cats and dogs war has broken down, and cats and dogs (and their owners) have begun to live with each other in harmony and peace.

And with that, you’ll excuse me. I need to look at every single post in r/awww.

AW HE THINKS HE’S PEOPLE!!!!!