It's so pretty here today. The weather is unseasonably hot for San Francisco (or so I keep hearing). Rainbow flags are flapping jubilantly in the breeze. The sun is shining and people are happy and relaxed.
I'm pissed off.
I've been pissed off like this before, but I have since shamefully crawled into my warm sugar coating and dutifully desensitized myself. Once, I was a precociously passionate and socially aware teenager with a shorn head and a burning anger for everything that is cruel and unjust in our world.
Then one day I woke up and realized that I have nearly grown into exactly what I said I would never be.
I was 13 years old. I had survived my parents' divorce, my father's remarriage to the poster child for the anti-crack campaign, my mother's crippling depression, Vanilla Ice, MC Hammer and
Zubaz.
I was a worldly little shit. (At least I thought so at the time.)
Beginning in my early childhood, I was taught to treat all living things with respect. I was taught the value of nutrition from fresh fruits and vegetables. I was taught to love everyone, no matter how different they were from me-- that hatred and prejudice were products of fear of the unknown. And most importantly I was taught to
"Never touch daddy's herbs".
Yes, I was raised by dirty hippies. Dirty and proud they were.
I was 13 years old. I didn't know the difference between Democrat and Republican. I just knew that
Proposition 2 was fucked up, because it said that my best friend Felix wasn't as good as everyone else because he was gay. So Felix and I hopped on the city bus, went to Colfax and Broadway and marched down the street wielding our "NO ON 2" signs like broad swords. I was barely visible in the crowd of six foot drag queens on four inch heels, (I hadn't even grown to five feet tall yet) but I shouted louder than anyone else under five feet tall that day.
The fire department turned their hoses on us. There were wigs, giant eyelashes, heels and feather boas flying everywhere. I was nearly trampled by a herd of stampeding drag queens. Some nice man in leather chaps and matching hood picked me up and carried me out of the range of the fire hoses.
I was still soaked when I got home later that evening after a very soggy ride on the city bus.
Mom was making dinner. She must have heard the squish-squeak of my soaked Converse sneakers as I crossed the living room into the kitchen.
"You were at the Prop 2 protest weren't you?" She was busily stirring a pot of lentil soup with one hand and loading a pan of corn muffins into the oven with the other.
"Yup." I peeled my soaked sweatshirt off of my midsection and tried to get it over my head.
"Don't do that in here, I just mopped."
I went to my room and changed into my pajamas. Mom poked her head in my room just as I was buttoning my top.
"Read this." She tossed a small dog-eared and warped paperback book with a torn cover on my bed.
"
Steal This Book?" I raised my eyebrows.
"Yup. It's right up your alley, Dollface."
"Cool."
That was the day that I decided I was going to "stick it (whatever that meant) to the man" (whoever he was).
I was a little overzealous with my involvement in various issues and protests, but that was okay, because I cared about something. I believed in something.
A little more than ten years later I wake up to realize that Aveda, Puma and a degree in journalism are now a bigger part of my life than human rights, humane treatment of animals and our infelicitous 'democracy'.
Sure, I bitch about these things as much as the next self-righteous fashionably liberal asshole with his pageboy cap, hemp backpack and Capri pants.
I bitch as much as I did when I was a pissed off kid.
The difference is that although I am more articulate, I am resigned to the passive acceptance and resignation cultivated by the weight of futility.
Once I believed I could make a difference.
I woke up this morning disgusted with myself. I woke up pissed off. Pissed off like I was when I was 13 and someone tried to convince me that gay people were less than human.
But this time I'm pissed off at the apathetic whale which has swallowed our doe-eyed, corn-fed American masses like minnows. I'm awake in the belly of a whale, pissed off again, soaking wet again, and with little more than a candle to see my way out.
There is a reason that I am pissed off:
On May 24, 2000, King5.com new service in Seattle, WA, broke a story about undercover footage taken at a nearby IBP slaughterhouse. According to their report, “The video shows fallen cows being trampled and dragged, others are tortured with electric prods. One cow has fallen and workers stick an electric prod on its head, then place the prod down its mouth. Still other cows are hung on chains, fully conscious, blinking and kicking. The worker who shot the tape said one cow was already at a station where legs are removed. ‘It would be horrible if someone were to cut off your leg without anesthesia.’”25
According to Steve Cockerham, a USDA inspector at Nebraska slaughterhouses, and former USDA veterinarian Lester Friedlander, some U.S. slaughterhouses routinely skin live cattle, immerse squealing pigs in scalding water, and abuse still-conscious animals in other ways to keep production lines moving quickly. The men stated that the federal law requiring slaughterhouses to kill animals humanely has been increasingly ignored as meat plants grow bigger. Cockerham said that he often saw plant workers cut the feet, ears, and udders off cattle that were conscious on the production line after stun guns failed to work properly. "They were still blinking and moving. It's a sickening thing to see," he said.26
Investigator Gail Eisnitz writes about widespread violations of the Humane Slaughter Act in her 1997 book Slaughterhouse.27 One of many such stories: “It was a plant where squealing hogs were left straddling the restrainer and dangling live by one leg when workers left the stick pit for their half-hour lunch breaks; where stunners were shocking hogs three and four times…where thousands of squealing hogs were immersed in the plant’s scalding tank alive.”
Source: whyvegan.org
This is only a sample of what is happening.
I hope that people would care enough to change their habits after learning of how these creatures are tortured. The sad reality is that our gluttonous and self-serving society values it's comforts over anything else. We justify it with text from the bible. God said it was okay to eat meat. Hell, that's why He made cows to begin with! Or wait... cows chew their cud, isn't that against the rules? What about pigs? I wonder if the guys who wrote
Leviticus knew that these animals were going to be tortured in the 20th and 21st centuries. I wonder if the bible needs some updating.
It's wrong to kill a puppy or a kitten, but there is nothing wrong with removing a male calf from its mother, cramming it into a tiny dark pin where its leg muscles atrophy because they are never used so that the veal will be extra tender.
There's nothing wrong with hanging a fully conscious hog by its legs with chains and slowly lowering it into a vat of boiling water to soften the skin.
It's perfectly acceptable to burn the beaks of chicks so that they don't peck other hens to death when they mature. It doesn't matter that most of them starve to death because it hurts too much to eat.
Who cares if ducks and geese are force fed to fatten their livers for pâté?
So yes, I'm pissed off. What am I going to do about it?
What can I do about it, other than refuse to support the various industries involved in animal cruelty?
I'm pissed off because people don't care. I’m pissed off because America can’t be bothered.
