![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
honeymonsterThe closest my heart has come to breaking lately was on the day my little girl arrived home from school and ran to me, her face tense with expectation, asking, "Are they still having that war in Afghanistan?"
As if the world were such a place that in one afternoon, while kindergartners were working hard to master the letter L, it would decide to lay down its arms. I tried to keep the tears out of my eyes. I told her I was sorry, yes, they were still having the war.
She said, "If people are going to just keep doing that, I wish I'd never been born."
I sat on the floor and held her tightly to keep my own spirit from draining through the soles of my feet. I don't know what other mothers do at such moments; I suppose that some promise that only the bad men are getting hurt. I wish I could believe in that story myself. But my children have never been people I could lie to.
*****
And yes, we eat some animals, in careful deference to the reasons for avoiding doing so. I don't really feel, as some have told me, that it is a sin to eat anything with a face, nor do I believe it's possible to live by that rule unless one maintains a certain degree of purposeful ignorance. Butterflies and bees and locusts all have faces, and they die like lambs to the slaughter (and in greater numbers) whenever a field of vegetable food is sprayed or harvested. Faceless? Not the birds that eat the poisoned insects, the bunnies sliced beneath the plow, the foxes displaced from the forest- turned-to-organic-wheat-field, and so on. If the argument is that meat comes from higher orders of life than those creatures, I wonder how the artificial, glassy-eyed construct of a bovine life gets to weigh more than the the wiles of a fox or the virtuosity of a songbird. Myself, I love wild lives at least as much as tame ones, and eating costs lives. Even organic farmers kill crop predators in ways that aren't pretty, so a vegetable diet doesn't provide quite the sparkling karma one might wish. Most soybeans grown in this country are genetically engineered in ways that are anathema to biodiversity. So drinking soy milk, however wholesome it may be, doesn't save animals.
*****
It's a fact of our culture that the loudest mouths get the most airplay, and the loudmouths are saying that in times of crisis it's treasonous to question our leaders. Nonsense. That kind of thinking allowed the seeds of a dangerous racism to grow into fascism during the international economic crisis of the 1930s. It is precisely in critical times that our leaders need most to be influenced by the moderating force of dissent. That is the basis of democracy, especially when national choices are difficult and carry grave consequences. The flag was never meant to be a stand-in for information and good judgment.
As if the world were such a place that in one afternoon, while kindergartners were working hard to master the letter L, it would decide to lay down its arms. I tried to keep the tears out of my eyes. I told her I was sorry, yes, they were still having the war.
She said, "If people are going to just keep doing that, I wish I'd never been born."
I sat on the floor and held her tightly to keep my own spirit from draining through the soles of my feet. I don't know what other mothers do at such moments; I suppose that some promise that only the bad men are getting hurt. I wish I could believe in that story myself. But my children have never been people I could lie to.
*****
And yes, we eat some animals, in careful deference to the reasons for avoiding doing so. I don't really feel, as some have told me, that it is a sin to eat anything with a face, nor do I believe it's possible to live by that rule unless one maintains a certain degree of purposeful ignorance. Butterflies and bees and locusts all have faces, and they die like lambs to the slaughter (and in greater numbers) whenever a field of vegetable food is sprayed or harvested. Faceless? Not the birds that eat the poisoned insects, the bunnies sliced beneath the plow, the foxes displaced from the forest- turned-to-organic-wheat-field, and so on. If the argument is that meat comes from higher orders of life than those creatures, I wonder how the artificial, glassy-eyed construct of a bovine life gets to weigh more than the the wiles of a fox or the virtuosity of a songbird. Myself, I love wild lives at least as much as tame ones, and eating costs lives. Even organic farmers kill crop predators in ways that aren't pretty, so a vegetable diet doesn't provide quite the sparkling karma one might wish. Most soybeans grown in this country are genetically engineered in ways that are anathema to biodiversity. So drinking soy milk, however wholesome it may be, doesn't save animals.
*****
It's a fact of our culture that the loudest mouths get the most airplay, and the loudmouths are saying that in times of crisis it's treasonous to question our leaders. Nonsense. That kind of thinking allowed the seeds of a dangerous racism to grow into fascism during the international economic crisis of the 1930s. It is precisely in critical times that our leaders need most to be influenced by the moderating force of dissent. That is the basis of democracy, especially when national choices are difficult and carry grave consequences. The flag was never meant to be a stand-in for information and good judgment.
- --Barbara Kingsolver
Small Wonder
