https://www.facebook.com/LastChanceForAnimals
The photo was just like the last straw for me. Another FB friend had posted it to her status and it showed up on my page. I didn't want to share it. I didn't want to make my FB friends uncomfortable. I didn't want to come across like some rabid animal rights extremist. But at the same time, people need to know the realities of what we humans are complicit in. My last comment on my long FB rant was I wonder how long it will be until we start using this procedure on humans, justifying it in all kinds of perverse ways.
It just seems we humans are growing more and more perverse and barbaric.
Then I opened my email and saw my daily newsletter from the Christian Vegetarian Association, by Lorena Mucke. And her report today was equally despair-inducing:
"It’s Time to Evolve
“Slaughtering animals for their meat is a socially-permissible ethical transgression”, says Bob Comis, farmer and writer. Comis raises pigs for food and agrees that he makes a living unethically, and that what he does to pigs is terribly wrong. Please visit The importance of our evolution beyond killing for food
Mr. Comis recognizes that there’s no need to kill animals to survive, and that killing them is unethical and terribly wrong. He tries to cause as little suffering to these creatures by raising them in the least abusive way he knows, but at the end, the pigs encounter a terrifying and painful death.
It’s time to evolve and to see that the practice of eating animals must end. It’s time for more peace, more joy, more health, more unity and more compassion."
Seriously...how human of us: we know what we're doing is barbaric, indefensible, and unethical. But we do it anyway. And we try to justify ourselves, and minimize our brutality, and insist we're good people, and at least what we're doing isn't as horrible as so-and-so.
The callousness toward other beings in these two stories is so all too familiar these days. And it's not just the animals suffering brutality at the hands of humans; we are pretty damned ugly toward each other as well. And boy are we humans creative and insistent in our myriad justifications: "we need meat for protein"; "I have the right to stand my ground!"; "national security"; "I've got to make a living"; "it's just business"; "we must fight the terrorists"; "it's none of your business how I treat my animals or kids or spouse, what I eat, what I wear, if I carry a gun"; "we adhere to the minimum humane laws"; "sorry that there are 'innocent casualties' but we're at war"....
Lorene Mucke says it's time to evolve. Oprah often quoted Maya Angelou as saying that we (humans, I guess...we who are ethical maybe) always do the best we can, and when we know better, we do better. Well, we are well beyond time to evolve, and yet we don't seem to be doing so. And like the pig farmer/slaughterer above, I think far too often we DO know better, but the knowing does NOT change our behavior, or our appetites, or our sense of entitlement, or our greed, or our lust for blood.
There doesn't seem to be any truly effective solution to the problem of us and our behavior on this planet. Science and education aren't the answer: we just seem to use our education, discoveries, and understandings, and innovative enterprise to find more means of exploitation and destruction. Religion has only seemed to make us more divided and hateful, and we often commit our brutalities in Gods name if not asking for His/Her blessing on our blood-letting. Atheism likewise hasn't seemed to make us more tolerant or respectful of others. The Bible does seem to be right about one thing: the love of money does seem to be rooted in evil, since money seems to only provide the resources to fund our bad behavior. Even activism and advocacy seem to be too impotent, too badly funded, too extremist, too poorly supported by long-term committed individuals to reach even first base on the journey to transformative critical mass.
And all the positive thinking meditations and gratitude lists can't seem to dispel the hopelessness I feel. Years ago on Nightline, Ted Koppel asked holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel why he continued to fight the seemingly impossible fight against hate. Wiesel responded that he had no illusions about making any real inroads against human hate, but that he fought against hate b/c it was the right thing to, that not resisting hate would be a capitulation. So regardless of progress or no progress he continued b/c he had no choice; it was really the only thing he could do.
But the new technologies of drone warfare--with it's impact on innocents--and brutality against animals in service to our appetites make it hard to stay the course.
Surely there's no doubt we can do much better. But will we? I'm not so sure.
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