don’t stop with the fall guy, blame his boss too
On March 11th, 2012, U.S. army sergeant Robert Bales made headlines when he went on a killing spree in Kandahr, Afghanistan, killing 17 civilians. In another infamous military tragedy, military personnel working at Abu Ghraib routinely abused, tortured, raped, humiliated, and assaulted prisoners. Once exposed, 11 soldiers had charges brought against them, and a few were sentenced to some jail time. Earlier this year, six Butterball employees and one state agriculture official were arrested on charges of animal cruelty for abusing turkeys in factory farms. Preceding this, in September 2010, Billy Joe Gregg, Jr. received an eight-month prison sentence for savagely beating and torturing cows on Conklin Dairy Farm.
Billy Joe Gregg, Jr. received only an 8-month sentence for heinous acts of abuse against cows
What all of these cases have in common is that a select few abusers took the fall for failed and violent institutions. Unfortunately, their punishments appeased most people, leaving a satisfaction that justice was somehow served or is being served. However, in letting these people take the fall and bear the burden of the guilt, a number of truths are masked and the violence is allowed to continue.
making the ordinary appear extraordinary
These prosecutions distract from the fact that these sorts of actions are normal within these institutions. It is the job of the military to systematically terrorize and kill others. Soldiers must learn to view the subjects of US imperialism as “enemies” and to deindividualize them. In seeing each individual as one and the same, it becomes feasible to kill them. That is what all armed conflict does, it strips the personhood from individuals and makes them a collective enemy so they can be detained, controlled, defeated, and killed. It makes sense that some people, trained to enact violence on others, cannot switch back and forth between when, where, how, and against who it is okay to use violence or to kill.
The cases discussed here were only addressed with symbolic reprimand because they could not be hidden from the public. They were punished not for what they did but for the fact the public found out about it. Rather than changing these institutions to prevent such atrocities, great lengths have been taken to prevent other public exposures. Whistle blowers such as Bradley Manning are punished for sharing military abuses publicly. Ag gag bills are popping up around the country, attempting to make it illegal to conduct undercover investigations on farms. (It was undercover investigations that exposed Conklin and Butterball).
Robert Bales, his trial has not yet commenced for the brutal murder of 17 Afghan civilians
The punishments doled out are tokens intended to appease and pacify us, while thousands of others are paid with or subsidized by our tax dollars to enact similar abuses on a daily basis, leaving billions tortured and murdered every year. Every time you pay your taxes, you pay for the tortured cows at Conklin, the prisoners held without charges and violently abused at Abu Ghraib, the millions of baby boy chickens thrown into grinders at meat packing plants, the environmental degradation of meat production, the murder and starvation of innocent civilians worldwide, and the list goes on. We pay taxes to maintain our privilege but our privilege comes with the exploitation, torture, and murder of others. And the people charged in the above-mentioned cases, are the people we pay to do this since we cannot bear to do it ourselves or to collectively do what it would really take to make it stop. When Abu Ghraib happens or Conklin Dairy Farm footage is released, we are forced to confront ourselves, and what is happening without our consent, but on our behalf. It is all too easy to accept the punishment of a few workers as a resolution to these problems. But these people are acting normally, within their circumstance.
Gregg was expected to subdue and move animals who weigh hundreds more pounds than he does. When they lie down he cannot move them. If he cannot move them he cannot get paid. His actions are unforgiveable, unexcuseable, unacceptable. However, given his constraints—the violent system in which he is entrenched, the fact that he kills hundreds of innocent beings on a normal day at work—his actions are not surprising. The system must be changed. To change the system, we need to keep our focus on the big picture and not be pacified with his prosecution. The supervisors who let him take the blame, the owners who profit off of mass murder in the first place, and the government who takes our tax dollars to subsidize this horrific industry—these too are the ones who need the be blamed.
Lynndie England only received a 3 year sentence for her role in the humiliation, abuse, and torture at Abu Ghraib
While a few token Butterball employees took the fall for the abuses animals regularly and normally face in the factory farming system, the higher up the chain of command the less blame a person had. While some workers were fired, the government official who tipped the plant off as to when inspections would occur (allowing for these abuses to go unmonitored) received little more than a slap on the wrist (two weeks suspension from work, a year of probation). Then, in a laughable twist, Butterball was actually rewarded for a safe working environment shortly after when five awards for worker safety were handed out by the American Meat Industry. The chickens and turkeys in Butterball plants are the true proletariat, the real working class. In this context, a safety award for protecting workers is beyond laughable.
the villain is a victim
In our fervor to punish these abusers, we also forget that they are victims. In their punishment, their victimhood is erased; further masking the system that instigates these violent acts and benefits the powerful few at the expense of the majority.
Most of these people ended up in their jobs as a result of their disadvantage. (Not all of course—Bales used to be a stockbroker, though being sent on four wartime tours did, arguably, make him a victim). This landed them in these positions to start, and made them particularly vulnerable to the control of their employers and the system that fostered their violence. The US military targets young kids with few opportunities and positions the military as a way out of their neighborhoods, financial worries, and other struggles. It becomes a viable option for steady employment, travel, and education possibilities for those who grow up in circumstances where they are disadvantaged by their families, income, a bad neighborhood, inadequate schools, or mistakes made in their youth. Rich kids are simply less likely to become combat soldiers, or factory farm workers for that matter.
The combat soldier and factory farm worker are at the bottom rung in their industry. They do the hardest, most dangerous, and most violent work—and they take the least pay. They must victimize others for their paycheck, and that can (and should) make a person crazy. They are monsters for what they did, but they alone are not to blame; we can’t forget that or it will never stop.
the fall-guy
The few who are punished serve as the fall guys to protect those who profit and benefit from these actions. The term scapegoat refers historically to animals who were literally cast out of cities and towns to symbolically carry the sins of the townspeople away. Fall guys are not as innocent as these scapegoats; unlike the scapegoat they did in fact commit horrific vicious unforgiveable acts. However, like the scapegoat, they are straddled with the burdens of others, who will be absolved of their responsibility as soon the fall guy is prosecuted. That is, unless we demand more than the prosecution of these few individuals.
If you train and pay someone to be a murder, she will be a murderer. If you monetarily reward someone based on his ability to conquer and kill others you will by necessity have someone who embraces violence and murder and who might strive to excel at it. Expecting these lessons to be enacted only when “the boss” says so is asking too much, particularly when there is often no logical justification for or discernable pattern to when and where the boundaries are, beyond the financial interests of a select few in power. “The boss” needs to be held accountable as well. In our hatred of these abusers our sights hone in on the fall guy, the most powerless among the abusers. We focus only on the ones who wielded the sword, not who gave them the weapon, trained them to use it, and placed them into psychologically traumatizing situations.
On another day, Bales might have received a medal for slaughtering human beings. Gree and the Butterball workers probably saw their superiors or coworkers viciously torturing animals as they did. I am not denying that these people have agency, that they are culpable for their violence, that they should not have done what they did, but I am calling attention to the fact that they did these things within systems where their actions were normalized and at times rewarded. We need to attack the system as well as the abuser.
All the abusers mentioned here deserve to be punished. And they deserve to be punished more harshly than they were. But that is just one screw loose in dismantling the machine of violence and oppression that these industries really are. The punished workers are expendable, unskilled, and replaceable to those in charge. Other workers have filled their place already and some are likely acting as they did. The machine will keep running. We need to remember that these injustices will continue to happen unless we start holding those in power—the ones who get to sit behind a desk and send others to do their killing—are held accountable and punished.
People profit off of a system where lives are rendered into objects, physically and ideologically. Lines are drawn between human and non-human, US-citizen and foreigners. We have constructed the boundaries of nationhood and species as if they are boundaries to our moral and ethical limits of care. However, they only exist to preserve systems of power and capital gain via institutions premised on violence and the success of the few at the expense of many. This system only works if the less privileged masses stay pacified blaming each other for the crimes of the powerful and never demanding that the real villains, the ones who drive this insanity but assume no risk, are held accountable.
the risk is real: anti-choice policy and personhood ammendments
A couple weeks ago marked the 39th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. This Supreme Court ruling gave women in the US the ability to have legal abortion, within limits. As many celebrate the anniversary of this landmark court case decision the religious right and political conservatives are in the middle of an assault on women’s bodies, trying to strip away our rights to and control over our health, our bodies and our families.
What seems to be misunderstood by some, particularly in my cohort and younger, is that the Roe v. Wade does not mean women have a legal right to an abortion, specifically. Roe v. Wade is a legal precedent about how to interpret the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution regarding due process and the right to privacy between a woman and her doctor. Further, because it is a Supreme Court ruling, it is long and detailed and involves a lot of language that might become challenging in the future. For example, the ruling limits abortion to embryos/ fetuses that aren’t “viable”—as technology advances the very language in Roe v. Wade could make it obsolete as a protection for women’s right to choose how to control their fertility.
the risk is real
A number of liberals I have spoken to do not acknowledge or actively combat (though maybe it is just that they can’t truly fathom), that this is a real and urgent issue. There is a true attempt to criminalize abortion and other types of fertility control. It has gone under the radar to some degree because those running for office who promote such policies (ahem…the republican presidential hopefuls) are not talking about moral issues; they are talking about job creation and the economy. They keep scrutiny off of the moral and social control they want to impose on the bodies and in the lives of women and other minorities by keeping the focus on the economy.
In a recent article, Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, highlights data from the Gutmacher Institute that underscore how drastic our situation is:
“[I]n 2011, state legislatures passed more than triple the number of anti-women’s health provisions than in 2010 — the highest ever. Twenty-four states enacted 92 new abortion restrictions last year, shattering the previous record of 34 adopted in 2005.”
Women my age have always had a right to privacy with their doctor, which feels like—and has been misconstrued as—the right to be able to choose having an abortion. When I discuss abortion with pro-choice people my age, instead of the discussion being about securing this right for all women, in the long-run, conversations are often about the decisions people would make in their personal lives. But, while the personal is political, the individual may not always be. Our sights need to turn back toward the bigger picture. We need to get out of our arm chairs and put on our riot gear because our rights, our liberty, our health, our wombs, our families, and our freedom are at risk. This is a real risk and this is an urgent matter.
inequality and mother-blaming
Woman in the US are living in a culture that already disadvantages women, especially mothers. Our society does not adequately support women financially, medically, psychologically, or socially—much less pregnant women, and especially not mothers. Financially, women are at a disadvantage in this society. Women make less money for the same work as men. The price of motherhood is even greater, with mothers incurring an average 3% wage penalty per year of absence for maternity leave or childrearing.
Even so, women are also expected to be the primary caregiver. A deadbeat dad might seem crappy, but he is not the type of villain that any woman who is not a perfect mother becomes. Women who do become mothers are often held to culturally impossible standards. Among the socially advantaged, mothers who work may be vilified as abandoning their children. At the same time, if a woman chooses not to work to be more available for her children she is seen as lazy, a social welfare pariah—unless, of course, she is independently wealthy or finds a partner to support her, stays home to rear her children, and is completely fulfilled (but not overly consumed) by this role. There is really no winning. Add to that the financial, emotional, and physical burden of pregnancy and motherhood. We treat these as personal issues so that those in power can refrain from providing social or fiscal support for childbearing. At the same time, our society judges women for their choices in their personal lives should they not be perfect pregnant women or perfect mothers.
It is in this context that women are expected to want to have children, even in situations when a pregnancy is unintended, unwanted, or unhealthy. We cannot force motherhood and childbearing if as a culture we don’t adequately support children or mothers.
anti-choice goals are anti-woman (and they also happen to lead to increased abortion rates)
Anti-choice goals are particularly insulting in light of the fact criminalizing abortion does not actually save lives or reduce abortion rates—if successful it will certainly kill more women and increase abortion rates. A reduction of abortion rates and women’s safety during abortions are tied to abortion being legal and accessible and women having access to and proper knowledge of contraception. As Susan A. Cohen of the Guttmacher Institute explains, abortion rates do not decrease when abortion in criminalized—criminalizing abortion just increases the rates of unsafe abortions. Rather, it decreases when contraceptives are used:
“[I]t is not the changes in abortion’s legal status that can explain the decreased abortion rate worldwide, since many more countries liberalized access to abortion than restricted it. Significantly, though, during this same period, contraceptive use worldwide increased and unintended pregnancy rates fell. Where contraceptive use increased the most, abortion rates dropped the most… Where contraceptive use is high, abortion can be legal and widely available, and still relatively rare. The lowest abortion rates in the world can be found in western and northern Europe, where abortion has been legal for decades but access to contraception is widespread.”
The anti-choice goal of criminalizing abortion results in more abortions and many women being forced into medical, familial, economic, and interpersonal situations that can be dangerous and even deadly. Promoting abortion restrictions is laughably unstrategic from the anti-choice perspective; it is not a way to help women, zygotes or fetuses.
Pro-choice activists are not “pro-abortion.” We would rather see sexual health education, access to birth control, and other health and family planning measures made available to preempt unwanted pregnancy in cases when women have a priori control. The only thing we currently have going for us is the hope that in the new insurance plan developed under the current administration, insured women should be able to get the birth control pill. However, anti-choice advocates and many of the conservatives currently in or vying for political power would also like to see even these choices outlawed.
personhood for who?
In an attempt to control the bodies and sexual activity of women, a number of conservative politicians are now pushing for Personhood Amendments. Personhood laws grant fertilized eggs personhood. In at least 22 states personhood proponents are working on some sort of effort to put a personhood amendment up to debate. These amendments highlight how immediate and aggressive the anti-choice threat really is.
Mississippi’s failed personhood amendment reads:
“Be it Enacted by the People of the State of Mississippi: SECTION 1. Article III of the constitution of the state of Mississippi is hereby amended BY THE ADDITION OF A NEW SECTION TO READ: Section 33. Person defined. As used in this Article III of the state constitution, “The term ‘person’ or ‘persons’ shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.” This initiative shall not require any additional revenue for implementation.”
Personhood is being defined in such a way that the personhood of women is placed second to the personhood of a zygote. This could make it illegal to even use the birth control pill. No, I’m not joking. It failed in Mississippi, one of the stronger attempts for the amendment, but it did not fail by enough to feel comforted—just over half (55%) voted against the amendment. That means almost half of all voters either supported or simply did not care if a zygote—regardless of whether it is viable or not—has more rights than a person.
Personhood amendments define woman’s bodies as tools that can be regulated, subordinate to the potential life of a fetus. Under these laws, women can be legally liable for any injury to that fetus. In a culture of misogyny and mother-blaming, this is likely to open the floodgate to the persecution and prosecution of women who miscarry. That this regressive idea is even being entertained and put on the political agenda should be ringing the alarm bells—we need to acknowledge that these are attempts at regressive sex-based laws and take the threat seriously.
Many proposed definitions of personhood identify insemination as the start of “biological life.” This could arguably make some of the safest, most effect forms of birth control illegal because the pill and other hormonal birth controls do not prevent insemination, just the implantation of an egg into the uterus walls. I suspect that this is part of the plan, at least for the more insidious among anti-choice advocates; it’s a clear attempt to chip away at sexual choice and reinscribe outdated and sexist moral codes that tie women to sexual contact only in the confines of marriage and with the expectation of motherhood. Essentially, women are being told that if they want to have sex, they should be prepared to be mothers.
Personhood is currently up for a vote in the Oklahoma Senate and some Democratic senators highlighted its absurdity and sexist nature by placing men in the same position of blame and control as women. One senator wrote a bill making the sperm contributor financially liable for the resultant child. Another, Constance Johnson, added language making masturbation and other sex acts not intended to procreate illegal. The amendment she proposed states, “[A]ny action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child.” She says she did this because “The Personhood bill would potentially allow governmental intrusion into families’ personal lives by policing what happens to a woman’s eggs without any similar thought to what happens to a man’s sperm. My amendment seeks to draw attention to the absurdity, duplicity and lack of balance inherent in the policies of this state in regard to women.”
As previously discussed, women’s lives are saved and abortion rates decline when abortion is legal, there is access to trained abortion providers, and contraception is widely available. If personhood advocates could step away from their confused moral and religious dogmatism and sexist ideologies of control over women’s bodies and actually look at the real world data, they would need to acknowledge that the call for a personhood amendment is antithetical to their goals; particularly as it could criminalize access to contraception, the best preventative measure for unwanted pregnancy.
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What pro-choice activists are fighting for is women’s right to control their own bodies, their own health and their own families. We are against a government, particularly one that is Eurocentric, male dominated, and organized and maintained by economically and socially advantaged people, having control of the bodies and choices of all women in their reproductive years. We cannot afford to wait until our rights are stripped from us and our persecution begins; we need to fight this now because it is real and it is happening.
a few notes on combatting repression
The following is adapted from a brief talk I gave before a benefit for the Free Speech 8. (If you have any extra cash these activists are currently having a fund drive to raise $1,000 by Dec. 1st to receive a matching donation. You can donate here, even after the fund drive ends.)
The benefit was a screening of Jill’s Film. A documentary and tribute to Jill Phipps, an effective, brave and committed animal activist. On February 1st, 1995 she was killed as she used her body as a shield to protect other animals.
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The most unfortunate side affect of the repression of legal activism is that for some it becomes either an excuse not to protest or a point of fear that discourages them from protesting. This is a problem for the movement because, for those individuals, businesses, and institutions that directly profit off or and genuinely don’t care about animals, protest may be one of the most effective legal routes to change. But protest by itself is not enough. It must be regular, sustained, and increasingly intensifying protest. Therefore, as movement, we need not only struggle to protect animals but must also combat repression, so that we can have a formidable number of people regularly protesting the same targets.
We must also shift the way we look at cases of repression—rather than allowing ourselves to be intimidated we should find room for celebration as this repression is a sign that we are effective. Repression would not happen if we were not being effective. No company or government will utilize resources to stop a movement that they do not fear.
The case of the Free Speech 8, the failed attempt of the federal government to prosecute in the AETA 4 case, and other cases involving neighborhood demonstrations should be taken as a sign that legal, above ground neighborhood demonstrations are effective. In 2011 Nature Magazine conducted a poll of biomedical scientists and about 30% said they had been negatively affected by animal rights activists—and experiencing protests counted as a negative experience. Among those, 15% changed the course of their research away from using animal models. These tactics are working, so we can’t give up.
There is an understandable argument that it is not productive to spend time on activist cases while animals suffer. The reality is, however, that unless we do, the repression will be effective and the activism and protests will stop. If our voices are silenced we cannot speak up for animals. And if the act of silencing us has an impact on the number of people who are willing to join in on this fight, then our battle will certainly be lost.
What we need is a community that is so strong and supportive in the face of repression that repression is nothing to be feared. I see a few ways to do this. First is understanding that you most likely will not get arrested. To test this theory out I did a (very unscientific) poll of my household. Between the three of us, we have engaged in somewhere between 1,400 – 1,500 protests. All together, we have been detained (which is when the police pull you aside, run your name, but then don’t do anything else and you are free to go) a total of 14 times, and arrested a total of once each. That means, that on average, we were arrested once per every 500 protests.
My Dad always told me I should live life based on probabilities, not possibilities. That is solid advice we should follow. We probably will not end up being arrested or even briefly detained for engaging in legal above ground activism.
The second thing we can all do is to be prepared for the worst-case scenario. Make sure someone who does not go to demos knows when you are at demos so that if you don’t come back they know you might be in jail. Give them a house key so you know that your plants, children and companion animals will be cared for. Let them know how much you are willing to spend on bail, if there is anyone (maybe a family member or friend) that might pay your bail, how many days you can take out of work, and what you boss’s phone number is. If you have medication, carry it with you so that you will have access to it if arrested. If you are prepared for the worst situation, even if it is extremely unlikely, you don’t have to be nervous.
Next, and this is the part we all need to work on, we need a community that supports each other. We need to develop an unwavering safety net so that activists with legal trouble can quickly raise funds for legal fees, and if we have money, we need to donate to those causes. We need to have an ethic at protests that if an activist is being detained we stand and support them, we pitch in to bail people out, we give people food or a place to sleep when times get tough, and we show up to court cases when we can.
This will accomplish two things. First, it will let animal liberation activists know there is nothing to fear because we will always all be there for each other. Second, it shows those who attempt to repress this movement that there is no point to it. If repression does not slow us down and if we refuse to accept it then they will stop engaging in it and we can get back to our real work of bashing in the system that confines, tortures, exploits, steals from, and murders the majority of life on this planet.
And we need to do this at every level, not just wait until the cases are huge federal AETA cases or cases with terrorist enhancements. We need to start by standing up to basic repression out on the streets—if a police officer says that you can’t be on a public sidewalk and you know you can, tell them so and stand there. When activists are prosecuted or ticketed at the misdemeanor level, make a HUGE national and international deal out of it. Free speech is integral to any free society, so shine a bright light on those who try to take it away simply because they don’t like what is being said. I truly believe that if we make a huge deal out of local repression every time it happens, the federal government will be more cautious and travesties such as the SHAC 7 case will not happen again.
Finally, we need to keep doing what we do. The norm needs to be staying in the streets, and repression should only rejuvenate and insight more protest. If you fear the small possibility that you will one day be the victim of repression, and you let that stop you from fighting for animals, you are little better than those we oppose as you have said that you value your comfort over their lives.
relating to oppression and taking a stand
Thanksgiving is my vegan fuel. In fact, my first post on this blog was in relation to this day. My first post encouraged simply abstaining from the event but this year I have decided the right way to celebrate Thanksgiving is by fasting. The thought process that got me here began with a news segment when I was about 13 years old and is encouraged by the current occupation of spaces around this country, which exemplify the oppression of the many by the few. The short story is that I plan to fast rather than feast this Thanksgiving. For the long story, keep reading…
Empathy through Relating
Thanksgiving has taught me the importance of relational understandings of the world and the role that personal experiences can have to connect us to experiences of others. Relational understanding provides a foundation for empathy; through relating one’s own experiences to that of the “other” some sort of understanding and caring can begin to happen.
In the case of animal rights, philosophers such as Peter Singer and Tom Regan have made great arguments for moral philosophies that encompass nonhuman animals. There are also stacks of data showing that animal rights ideology is logical—eating meat will kill us, drinking pasteurized milk increases risk of osteoporosis, farming practices are torturous, leather and fur production is environmentally irresponsible, animal testing has never cured cancer and is not a good model to test the hazards of substances. I think this is all great; we need rational justifications that systematically torturing and murdering animals, trapping them for entertainment purposes, killing them for sport, raising and slaughtering them to wear their skins, or eating their flesh until we are diseased is wrong.
However, rational, empirical facts are not enough. Recent books by psychologists Melanie Joy and Hal Herzog both show that we are a schizophrenic society. We do illogical things to animals and in relation to animals. For example, we kill some cows for leather, and then we kill different cows for meat, but we don’t kill cats or dogs at all (in Western cultures anyway). Most silently allow our country to spend money on wars that lead to the deaths of millions of innocent people, at the same time that they fervently believe in pacifism. People get into a frenzy over protecting small numbers of dolphins and whales and even encourage government money to be spent on the issue. However, few ever question that over 97% of all animals used in research studies—rats, mice, and birds, for example—are not technically classified as animals at all by the federal government and so are not protected by any animal cruelty laws in that setting. These inconsistencies are not based in reason.
Our culture has a twisted circle of compassion that is not logical or rational and is so entrenched that the illogic is not even discernable to most. We need more than logic to explain these problems to people; we need people to feel empathy. Our own feelings are something we know to be true. If we can use that knowledge to generate empathy and relate to the experiences of others, we can connect in a deeper way.
Thanksgiving as Relationally Transformative
For me, Thanksgiving has been a holiday that has served as a conduit for relational understandings of oppression. I was about 13 years old when I saw a news segment in which people were using frozen turkeys in lieu of bowling balls for some sort of holiday lawn bowling competition. Something about the light-hearted nature of the segment and that this was the news cast’s “feel good” segment disturbed me. I never ate another turkey. I wasn’t introspective or comfortable enough with myself at that time to fully investigate my feelings or to even understand why I acted on them, I just did. It took another decade before I embraced veganism, slowly eschewing various practices of species, gender, race and class domination along the way.
Looking back at that “turkey decision” now, I remember that I was studying the Holocaust at the time. I was in a program in high school that required me to conduct a self-directed, year long research project. That year I chose the Holocaust. It was for personal reasons, as my father and his family are all Jewish. My grandfather immigrated to escape the pogroms in Russia; my father was born in 1935 and went through postsecondary education at a time when there were quotas to keep Jews out of schools. Marked by the sense of fear that this history stirred inside of me, I traversed the Holocaust by taking my video camera to survivors and asking them to tell me their stories. I was deeply disturbed by the events of the Holocaust and moved by the survivors I met.
I remember the connection I felt between the Holocaust and Thanksgiving; I believe I even verbalized it once or twice at the time, though it is easier to understand now than it was then. What struck me about the turkeys being used as bowling balls was that their deaths were purposeless and I could finally understand that because I understood what had happened to the Jews in the Holocaust was unnecessary and I had deeply felt emotions about it. I didn’t complete the logic for many years–that all murder, be it for sustenance or desire or domination, is unnecessary and senseless–but in my personal understanding of the needless, systematic, mass slaughter of ‘my own people’ I related to the needless, systematic, mass slaughter of turkeys at Thanksgiving time.
Some people reject the parallel of the Holocaust to animal slaughter, but for me it was in that space that I came to understand animal suffering. As I have discussed before, relational understanding through sexual assault has also helped me connect to the experiences of factory farmed animals. But in regard to Thanksgiving, specifically, there have been other beliefs and feeling and experiences I had that over the years have rubbed up against the violence of the holiday. The insanity of this holiday has allowed me, over time, to see, acknowledge, and deplore oppression in our society, even where it has been normalized and even when it doesn’t directly affect me.
When I learned the truth of the deception of the Plymouth settlers I felt personally deceived by the education system. That feeling then allowed me to connect to and better empathize with the more serious deception and betrayal that European colonizers and those of us of their ancestry have enacted on all indigenous and non-white people in this country. It made me better understand the futility of national boundaries and state-generated wars, as well as the bullshit behind political “concessions” to minority groups who shouldn’t need to be fighting for equal rights in the first place. Though my own experiences and feelings do not parallel those of others, they have allowed me to find empathy. I can acknowledge the plight of others, whose shoes I have the privilege of not walking in, and to acknowledge that their injustice exists.
Relating Inorder to Reject Thanksgiving
I despise the US thanksgiving tradition and each year I am disturbed to watch the majority of people in my communities, often myself included, engage in the practice just because it is tradition, rather than taking a political and social stance not to engage in this ostentatious celebration of inequality and oppression.
There are so many connections that I wish others would make through their own understandings and experiences of the world. I want the Occupiers to acknowledge that, in the big picture, nonhuman animals and the earth are the 99%. I want their experience of the minority oppressing the majority to help them build empathy for the animals slaughtered on this day. I want people who have experienced racism to use that experience to build empathy for those who were tricked, exploited, and betrayed by the colonizers and to reject this holiday as it is a symbolic celebration of oppression. I want women to recognize that the factory farming of animals disproportionately targets female-bodied individuals. In their understanding of what it feels like to live in a society that is generally unsafe and unfair to women (e.g. 1 in 4 women are sexually assaulted by the time they reach their mid 20’s, women still do the majority of housework, women make less than men for the same jobs), I want women to build empathy for the turkeys at the dinner’s centerpiece and all the animals who were beat or raped or otherwise tortured and killed for milk and butter and eggs and the other meat on the table.
Most years on Thanksgiving I try to simply ignore what is happening, or I show up to a vegan potluck and call it “Thanksliving” to feel better about my compliance. But this year, I want to use it to create new experiences that might help me relate better to the world around me. All experiences can be transformatively relational if you are open to it, and this year I will try to be. I have spent years trying to pretend like this holiday has no meaning, but it is bursting with meaning. For me, Thanksgiving exemplifies the intersections of so many oppressions. In honor of and in solidarity with all of those who have been killed, starved, abused, exploited, and neglected as a result of the “bounty” of my country, I will not feast this Thanksgiving but I will fast instead. I know it is just symbolic and it will not create change, but I do know that for those with privilege, the consumption of food is a political act. We have the privilege to choose what we eat, and that is why I am vegan.
On Thursday I will fast to protest and reject murder for the sake of gluttony, the subjugation of the disadvantaged by the privileged, and bounty for few at the expense of many.
dilemma: doing it all vs. doing one thing well
Several years ago I made a decision to be a committed activist. The problem? I care about a lot of social issues. In the end, I decided that since other animals have the fewest voices speaking up for them and, cumulatively, the greatest numbers of individuals suffer the most abuse, that that is where I would focus my activist energy. Plus, it was my entre into the animal rights world that made me truly understand the necessity and immediacy of activism.
I made a choice to be focused on one cause, because of the belief that energy focused mainly on one movement would be more effective than scattered energy. So, though I occasionally work with other campaigns for various causes, I keep most of my energies in animal rights. As Mississippi pushes a personhood amendment, occupiers take their cities over, Food Not Bombs hits the dumpsters and the streets, and many other necessary actions are taken to fight the normalized oppression in our society, I want to be there. But I have come to terms with not being there because of my perception (accurate or not) that there are more people engaged with those issues than there are with animal rights issues.
Though I decided to choose only one topic of activism for my main focus, I have not chosen only one tactic or even one avenue ofanimal rights work. I have tried to play two hands at once and do both in-the-streets activism and academic activism simultaneously. Not only that, but within each of those realms I try to do multiple things. Behind the computer screen I am working at an animal protection organization and researching and publishing outside of work as well. In the streets I organize a campaign which involves everything from keeping up a website to going to protests. I also actively support a number of campaigns and I am at anywhere from one to three protests a week. I belong to an animal rights organization as an active member who volunteers and attends meetings and I meet other obligations for this group and other activists. Oh yeah, and I give money each month until I am living on my credit card debt.
I am busy and I am seriously multitasking. But what strikes me the most is that, among activists, my story is in no way unique. I think of my activist community and I can readily think of others in my position. For example, one woman I know is amazing at fostering and re-homing cats and she is a dedicated activist. She works as much as she can at her job to financially care for and find homes for cats, volunteers at a cat rescue, and takes cats to adoption events. At the same time, she is an activist and regularly attends protests and other outreach events. From the outside looking in at her I see the struggles she faces. She needs to work to afford all the cat food and litter and medical emergencies, but she arranges work shifts around the week’s protest schedule, even if it means she makes less money.
My friend usually tells me she is handling it all just fine. I thought I was handling my balancing act well too, until my body revolted. As I was in the last couple months of graduate school, I showed up at a protest I had organized. Half way into the protest, my body broke out in hives. I knew I had to be writing my dissertation, but I knew I had to be at this protest as well, and the clash was simply too much. It was the second time in my life and the second time that month I had broken out in hives.
This physical protest staged by my body forced me to think about what I was doing. And what I was doing was too much. The more I thought I also realized that not only was I doing too much but that my distracted attention kept me from doing anything particularly well. I decided that I would be more focused. But, of course, nothing has come of this.
Why? Because choosing to excel at something, when it means abandoning something else, is a high stakes game when it comes to activism and animal rights. I know that my education provides me a platform others don’t have. The letters I put before and after my name mean that people let me give talks and publish my papers and if I play it right I can get animal issues taken seriously in research and academia. At the same time, I will do what so few other vegans will—I will get out into the streets and raise my voice. I will look at the toolbox of tactics and use less popular tactics such as protesting in a regular, strategic manner, and not just on Fur Free Fridays.
I can clearly see where I am useful in each realm, and I can clearly see the benefits each might have for animals (of course we need many tactics working together simultaneously to create change). So, how do I choose one over the other? How would my friend described earlier choose between only fostering or only doing activism? How would you choose between any two of the things you do on a regular basis to help animals?
Maybe the answer is not to choose. I know that is what I have been doing but, for me, it is not working. At work I feel guilty that I am not running my campaign. When I am doing that I worry I should be trying to get my writing out. When I write I am distracted because I could be working or at a protest. I am everywhere doing lots of things but I am never really “there” and I always feel that I should be doing more. I feel like a bad academic, and uncommitted worker, and a slacktivist even though I am dedicating most of my day to proactively trying to help assuage the ideas and behaviors that allow animals to suffer and die en mass every single second of every single day.
And while I hope this is some strange affliction or issue that only I have, I know it is not. This movement is run by a small, dedicated group of people who, protest, blockade, petition, speak up and speak out with every ounce of energy and second of time we have. There is activist folklore and myriad examples of the dreaded “burnout,” but I wonder, if I choose to do just one thing,and to do it well, maybe I can avoid that. And let me be very clear, by choosing one thing I don’t mean a total rejection of anything else. Anyone can make it to one or two protests every week, no matter what else they are doing. I could always keep up this blog even if my main focus was on running a campaign. What I am talking about is choosing only one avenue of activism/ animal rights work to focus on, and having only one major project within that realm.
I spoke to another researcher recently who is actively focused on animal rights. I am impressed by the level of energy and time he is investing in collecting and analyzing data for a particular project. When I told him that he said some thing to the effect of, “this doesn’t seem like much, I used to be an organizer.” It really drove home for me the amount of work each of these things takes and the way one’s thoughts must border on obsession to come up with the type of innovative ideas that actually drive change. But to become consumed, enveloped, obsessed by an issue, one must be free of other agendas.
I can see the beauty in dealing with only one issue at a time. The problem is, that if I do choose one focus, no matter what path I take I can’t imagine that I will ever feel good about the path I chose not to take. That is an unfortunate side effect of being willing to acknowledge suffering—once you acknowledge it you can’t ignore it. And even if our struggle to right the wrongs of our species seems hopeless, we are ethically bound to at least try. In a movement where the actions that each of us takes is just a tiny drop in a huge bucket of what needs to get done, it is difficult to judge our impact. It will take millions more like us to achieve our goals, and so there will likely never be proof in our lifetime that we have taken the “right” path, the one that will save the most lives. [1]
In the end it is clear that I am doing a lot of things, but I am doing none of them well enough. I can recognize that, but what I can’t do is decide what to better and what to leave behind.
Footnotes:
[1] The only clear exception to this I see is fostering, adopting and doing sanctuary work for animals or freeing individual animals from situations of abuse. The people who do this are definitely having a profound immediate impact. However, for those of us focused on longer-term goals or cultural or institutional shifts, there is little to direct us.
choosing sides, not issues
I recently spoke out in a very mild way against a local fundraising event called Diamonds Not Fur. The event was sponsored by a diamond company, with attendees paying $100 a plate (after some fighting, the organizer agreed to make the meal vegan, at least). A portion of the proceeds went to organizations that were anti-fur. Other portions of the money raised funded the party and went to the organizer. I said, in a Facebook post:
I am very saddened that so many of my animal rights friends are choosing to go to the Diamonds Not Fur fundraiser tonight. If you have $100 to give to animals, give it to animals, don’t give it to an event that supports the exploitation on human animals and diverts your funds to paying for food and a party planner. The battle for liberation is doomed if activists continue to vote for oppression with their pocket books because they like to have nice things and go to fancy places.
-vegina on Facebook
Another activist, whom I very much adore and respect, felt that my comment was derisive because activists who worked hard for animals decided to go. This comment was sensible—we are in a movement where we would be better to support each other than to critique. However, there are some times when critique is needed, and often for me that is the focus of this blog. There are two separate scenarios of questioning other activists and they need to be defined and discussed. Because, while one way of questioning activists is harmful, the other is necessary.
We need to begin to think of different forms of activism as being different spokes on a wheel. I don’t now where the analogy came from, but it is a good one. Imagine our cause is a wheel that needs to keep rolling forward. Activists are the spokes that support that wheel. If we want our activism to keep moving all the spokes must remain intact. If we imagine the spokes as different tactics, it is clear that we cannot cut down other factions of the movement. That will add weak spots to the wheel and slow progress.
In other words, one need not actively support other tactics, but should not denigrate them. This means that we should not spend our time insulting people who engage in tactics we think are less effective than our own. We should stick to what we think is best and let other activists do what they think is best.
For example, in the ballots v. bullets debate, I don’t work toward ballots and I am sympathetic to bullets, but I personally engage in something else—legal, in-the-streets protest activism. As an individual I am not comfortable with the personal risks of illegal activism, so I don’t engage in it. But I certainly don’t talk badly about the people to do. The reason I don’t work toward ballot and political measures is because I don’t think they actually change much. However, in a movement where we don’t actually know what works, the claim cannot be made that the idea of political changes never helps animals, so I would not disrespect anyone who worked toward that.
When tactics MUST be questioned is when they hurt animals (human and nonhuman). Whatever you support, any “type” of tactic can go awry and when they do it is our duty to question them. For example, one can support arson, but be opposed to an action that was not well-planned and put lives at risk. One can support making political and legal inroads but feel that a ballot measure is so weak that the funds and time it would divert would lead to a negative outcome for animals. It is when a tactic is used in a harmful manner that we must speak out. The thing I was speaking out against in regard to the Diamonds Not Fur event is the fact that as a movement for liberation we CANNOT contribute to the oppression of others. (I have said this before, many, many, many times…)
In general, posh fundraisers aren’t my thing. If I have $100 to spare at the end of the month I make sure it ALL goes to an organization or campaign I care about, I don’t use it to go to an event that will take a huge cut of the money to pay for food. [When I (happily and voluntarily) attend a social fundraiser, I like it to involve the charity getting all the money or food that I was going to eat anyway (*ahem* Veggie Grill or Clara Cakes bake sales).] The Diamonds Not Fur event was particularly ridiculous because the main organizer took a percentage of the proceeds. But even if I did like the idea of fundraising in this manner, I CANNOT let my energy, time, or money support the oppression of others. No one who cares about liberation should.
The diamond trade is a nasty business. It destroys families, children, and entire nations. Diamonds became popular through an advertising campaign that De Beers stared in the 1940’s, attempting to make diamonds a symbol of love and commitment. The “diamonds are forever” campaign worked and they are now the chosen stone of engagement rings in the Western world. The value attributed to diamonds, artificially inflated by De Beers’ market manipulations of the stones since the 1800’s, has made them valuable commodities that fund wars and create instability in a number of African nations. The diamonds most commonly associated with violence are popularly called “conflict diamonds” or “blood diamonds.” Amnesty International summarizes the issue:
Some diamonds have helped fund devastating civil wars in Africa, destroying the lives of millions. Conflict diamonds are those sold in order to fund armed conflict and civil war. Profits from the trade in conflict diamonds, worth billions of dollars, were used by warlords and rebels to buy arms during the devastating wars in Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Sierra Leone. Wars that have cost an estimated 3.7 million lives.
-Amnesty International
To “fix” these problems the “Kimberly Process” emerged, intended to verify that diamonds were not from a conflict region. However, once conflict diamonds exit their origin country and enter the open market, they are indistinguishable from other diamonds. The Kimberly Process has openly been acknowledged as flawed. It essentially exists to allow privileged conspicuous consumers in the Western world to feel absolved of any criticism or guilt. Even so, Diamonds Not Fur justified their event by saying the diamond companies sponsoring only carried diamonds that were Kimberly approved.
Many said after the fact, “But we didn’t know!” But the bottom line is, you should have. A number of pro-animal, anti-fur campaigns were direct recipients of the fundraiser and other animal activists made them aware of these issues. Objections were posted on the invite page for the event. None of this made a difference. Diamonds are associated with rich people and, to some, the sin of human oppression was alleviated by the allure of donation money.
People paid a lot of money to go to an event to “help animals,” but did not think about who they were hurting. Though I don’t know the exact amount the organizer received, money went to an individual person, a socialite married to millionaire, who doesn’t need a penny. Only a fraction of the money went to animal groups. And in the process of raising money to combat the vapid practice of wearing fur, the vapid practice of wearing diamonds was promoted. Conspicuous consumption, which results in the death of millions of innocents, was still promoted. Whether you are wearing fur or diamonds, you are drenched in blood.
It was the responsibility of the animal groups who received the money to make that connection. It was the responsibility of their $100 a plate guests to as well. All these people stayed silent, complicit in oppression, so it became my responsibility to say something. Using one’s voice for the innocent, the oppressed, and the silent among us is what liberation is all about. This is not a quibble about which tactic is best. We have a toolbox full of tactics and I support some more than others, but I am generally okay with whatever tool you choose to use, even if I think it’s weak. What I am not okay with is when a tool for liberation is used for oppression. A fundraiser that contributes to instability and war across an entire continent, which has left nearly four million dead, many more poor, humiliated, raped, maimed, and emotionally and physically broken is something that must be opposed, rejected, and called out, no matter who benefits from the event.
The tradeoff of selling out one disadvantaged group to assist another disadvantaged group is reprehensible. The idea that it is a morally acceptable choice to financially support one oppressive industry in order to undercut another oppressive industry is ridiculous. I don’t choose JUST animal liberation, or women’s liberation, or human rights, or ethnic equality, or sexual freedom. Why? Because I cannot value one type of freedom over another. I simply value liberation over oppression. People need to choose sides, not issues. You are either on the side to the oppressor or you are on the side of liberation. I choose liberation.
I recently had the privilege of putting together a pamphlet with Nicoal Renee Sheen of Band of Mercy. I want to share the text we produced, as it wraps up a lot of the issues touched on in this blog.
Nicoal and I will be having an informal panel discussion on this topic at the Animal Rights 2011 Conference in Los Angeles this Friday, July 22nd, at 10pm. If you will be at the conference please stop by. We have not been assigned a room yet, but if you are at the AR2011 conference stop by the Band of Mercy table and we will tell you where it is. (If you want information on how to format this for a pamphlet, let me know.)
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by Nicoal Renee Sheen and vegina
For every life, demand liberation.
Animal liberation will only come with total liberation. Until there is total liberation we will live in a world of inequality, where those in power will seek out ways to confine and control the masses. Sexism, racism, ageism, ablism, heterosexism and nationalism, or any other form of systematic inequality, must always be rejected. For any inequality is a roadblock if we are to have true liberation. We must make community organizers, feminists, anti-racists, anarchists, and anyone working for social justice our comrades. We cannot use their oppressions as a tool to forward our own goals. We must acknowledge that total liberation will only come if we absolutely believe in liberation for everyone; even when that means giving up some of our own advantage and comfort.
Interconnections of Oppressions. All oppressions are rooted in a single system that privileges capitalism, masculinity, individualism, and whiteness over all else. Under this system everyone who is considered “less than” is subject to exploitation and domination. Those labeled as less than or expendable, e.g. non-human animals, people of color, women, are viewed as objects rather than full beings with their own interests or emotions. After someone is deemed inferior, oppressors are able to commit violence against them with ease. The exploitation of different groups is intertwined and at times mutually dependent. Here are just a few of the ways that oppressions are interconnected and reinforced:
Slaughterhouses. In 2009, over 9,000,000,000 land animals were murdered in U.S. Slaughterhouses, making it the most dangerous industry for animals in this country. It is also one of the worst places for human workers, who tend to be immigrant and/ or ethnic and racial minorities. Many workers immigrate with false promises of citizenship from company recruiters, the conditions in slaughterhouses lead to a high risk of food contamination and the human workers, who work without unionization or healthcare benefits, are in great danger on a daily basis. In 2005 the Human Rights Watch issued a statement identifying meat-packing plants the most dangerous factory job in the U.S. Women are also at particular risk, as rates of violent and sexual crimes is higher in communities with slaughterhouses.
Control of reproduction. Rape is a tool used systematically by men and the broader society to control and manipulate female bodies. Animal exploitation is carried out through the rape of animals, where reproduction is exploited for profit. All female cows on a dairy farm will be raped and her children taken and enslaved so humans can drink her milk. One in three women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. Society assumes that both female chickens and women are made to reproduce for another’s purposes. Female chickens are induced with hormones to create the unnatural surplus of eggs for human consumption. Women are expected to repopulate for the needs of capitalism i.e. laborers and consumers.
Language. When individuals are devalued through language their abuse and exploitation is more difficult to notice and easier to justify. Language often times is used to diminish people of color, women and animals. Women are often degraded through name-calling that equates them to animals. For example, by using words like “bitch” and “chick.” Racism has often been justified by equating racial and ethnic minorities to animals. Chinese were compared to rats in 19th century popular culture, Latinas are currently called “breeders,” and the list goes on. Such language degrades women, minorities and animals at the same time.
Animals are often referred to as objects (“it” instead of he or she) or groups (flocks, herds), rather than as individuals. This renders their individual qualities invisible, making their exploitation and murder easier. This is the same way that slaves and native populations were referred to and that immigrants, particularly undocumented migrants, are still spoken about today.
A shifting line. The line between who has rights and who doesn’t has shifted. Throughout history, different groups of people and animals have been included or excluded depending on what they are considered “good for” according to the dominant class.
We value pet animals but devalue food animals, even though all these animals have the same ability to feel emotion and physical pain as we do. Native populations experienced genocide when Europeans migrated to this continent, black Africans were classified as animals to justify slavery, and the U.S. government has changed immigration policies to meet the needs of American capitalism, allowing different groups of people entrance or citizenship as they meet our needs for labor. Such oppression remains today and must be eliminated.
We can’t free the animals if we oppress others. It is often difficult to acknowledge or understand the way that oppressions are interconnected since each type of exploitation is historically and contextually different. But we must remember, there is one overarching system that privileges only a select few. This works by placing arbitrary boundaries between those who have power and rights and those who don’t. These lines are established to ensure that only the ruling class maintains power and the oppressed remain divided.
When we oppress others, we reinforce the same system we actively fight against. When we fight among social movements for whose oppression matters most, we do the work of the oppressor and keep ourselves as distinct, separate groups. Instead, we need to join together and fight injustice at its roots.
veganism, activism, and the reality of depression
Since I have become vegan a lot of positive things have happened. I am physically healthier and I am finally living a life that aligns with my values. I would NEVER go back to a life in which I chose to embrace ignorance over knowledge, particularly because the cost is the life of another. Now that I am vegan I will never again value the ease of the status quo over the difficult reality of the truth. In fact, now that I am vegan I understand the need for each person to live not only a life of compassion and equality, but to act as an advocate for others by engaging in activism.
Though I prefer the path that I have chosen it has come with significant and sometimes painful side effects. For me, veganism and activism has come with depression. Once I acknowledged that what happens to nonhuman animals is the fault of human animals, and once I accepted responsibility for working toward assuaging the injustice that leaves billions dead every year, I knew for the first time in my otherwise privileged life what it felt like to be impotent, ineffective, and silenced.
I do not know if I am alone. But I am discussing this because I assume I am not, and I don’t think that silence is helpful. As vegans and animal rights activists we live in a world that questions our lifestyles, our motivations, our health, and even our sanity at times. For this reason, many are fearful to talk of any negative aspects of our veganism. However, I want to air our vegan laundry. First, because not talking about these things does not make them go away. And second, in this case, it is not our fault. We are not unbalanced or unhealthy for reacting with sadness to the fact that most people choose murder in order to preserve the status quo. We are not pathological, the rest of the world is, and it is okay to experience pain in the face of this reality.
We know that the decision we make not to partake in abuse and murder is the only logical decision to make. But we also know that most people insist on remaining blinded and denying the injustices they engage in, for fear of the changes they will need to make. To add to all of this, we are few and far between so in many environments we are tokens. We don’t represent ourselves as individuals, but to our families or colleagues or classmates we are the face of veganism or activism. This can lead to the idea that we need to be perfect human beings for the sake of promoting the vegan message. I think that because of this, we neglect discussing the difficult issues we face as a consequence of the necessary and compassionate choices we have made. We seem to embrace Stepford veganism in an attempt not to deter others from embracing a vegan lifestyle.
In an effort to prove to the world that our choices are right, we neglect to attend to or even admit negative side effects that come along for the ride. But acknowledging that there are billions murdered and abused on a daily basis is a painful recognition. It is only logical that this recognition comes with pain. Before I became vegan, I was not bothered much by conspicuous consumption. Now I have what I have dubbed the “Schindler’s syndrome.” Every penny I spend becomes a life to me—a rescued animal I could have helped spay, a Sea Shepherd salary I could have helped fund, footage of an undercover investigation I could have helped distribute. Before I became an activist I could sleep soundly at the end of the day. Now I get in bed exhausted, tinges of pain over each moment that could have gone better, worried the time that I took for the protests is effecting my job, worried that my job is effecting my dedication to activism, concerned that friends and family won’t understand why I must sometimes choose activism over them, frustrated that no matter how hard I fight, the movement seems only gain a critical mass of potluckers but not protesters. This all accumulates into anger or sadness or frustration on a regular basis, emotions I rarely dealt with previously.
I believe that with time I will learn to manage and deal with these feelings. I hope that one day I can understand the pain I feel in a way that allows me to better work toward change. In the meantime, I have decided not to hide this experience. This is an issue in our community that I am probably not alone in facing. We need to acknowledge that accepting the path of compassion can come with sadness. We need to be aware that our comrades might feel this way. Once our community acknowledges that we are not supposed to be super humans, we can help each other cope and heal and strive to at least become super guardians, super fosters, super advocates, super spokespersons and super activists for the animals.
I am depressed. Some days my heart is heavier than my feet and I have no energy to get up and go. But I am not depressed because I am vegan nor am I depressed because of my activism. I am depressed because most people choose to exploit animals for culinary preference, fashion, and entertainment—no good reason at all when it comes down to it. While this is my burden, it is not my problem. The problem is them, not me.
in support of total liberation
We are a movement 
being pacified with veganism and potlucks. Yes, it is important to embrace a lifestyle that rejects death for sustenance and encourages camaraderie. We do need at least that, but we also need more. We need total liberation.
Animal liberation will only come with total liberation. Until there is total liberation we will live in a world of inequality, in which those in power will seek out ways to confine and control the masses. Sexism and racism and ageism and disablism and heterosexism and nationalism, or any other form of disadvantage or abuse targeted at populations because they are different from those in power, must always be rejected. We must keep our eyes on animal liberation, running toward it full force, using our fists to push back any other inequality that rears its head. For any inequality is a roadblock if we are to have a world of liberation. We must make community organizers, feminists, anti-racists, anarchists, and anyone working for social justice our comrade. We must hold their hands, and not grasp their oppressions as a tool to forward out own goals. We must acknowledge that total liberation will only come if we absolutely believe in liberation for everyone; even when that means relinquishing some of our own advantage and comfort.
We must not be satisfied with constructed truths or half measures. Bigger cages save no one and lengthen the route to change; they institutionalize our claims within the very systems of exploitation that generate and justify the abuses, inequalities, injustices, mass genocide, and torture to which we are opposed. Liberation, once institutionalized and embraced
by these systems, is nothing more than welfare at its best and rhetoric at its worst. We must not concede to accept less for other animals than what we would want for ourselves. When we turn our attention to bigger cages rather than empty cages, we are gluing shut the locks of the oppressed, not of the oppressors, and we keep the concept of animal imprisonment and ownership intact.
When we persist in the struggle for liberation there is nothing to fear and everything to hope for. Yes, it is true, authorities repress us and will continue to do so. Their repression is a sign of their fear. Their fear is a token of hope. It means we are effective and now is the time to push forward not to shirk in fear. Do not hide, or cower, or silence yourself on their behalf. Do not stay locked inside your home because you fear they will lock you behind their bars if you step out and speak up. Do not cage yourself like they have caged the animals. Be free, and in your moments of freedom, lend your voice to the dogs and cats and bunnies being killed in shelters, the cows and pigs and sheep and goats and chickens and turkeys living the most painful lives and meeting the most violent deaths so that their bodies can be rendered into “food,” the elephants and tigers and bears who are beat until they perform tricks, the monkeys and cats and dogs and mice and rats and bunnies and guinea pigs and fish and alligators tormented daily in Frankensteinish experiments that help no one and solve nothing.
We have an obligation. As those who recognize the insanity inherent in the way that billions of animals are tortured and murdered, we must do something about it. The thing we must do is to fight for total liberation. We must never compromise ourselves or our goals. Our potlucks and our veganism should not be all that defines us. We should define ourselves by the work we do to free others. Veganism should be the foundation upon which we build our work for total liberation. Potlucks should be where we rejuvenate, take in love from our community to strengthen ourselves, and build unity in our fight against oppression. Each of us 
must cultivate the talents we have and the skills we’ve learned so that we can better fight for animals. We must be honest about our own capacities and aptitudes to decide how best we can help. We must also acknowledge that different people can help in different ways, allowing us to stand in awe and support, not in judgment, of those who fight this battle from a different vantage point.
The world is a tragic place these days. Environmental devastation, human atrocities, and individual acts of hatred and violence abound. We can give up all hope in this context or we can fight for change. Yes, we will make mistakes and yes, sometimes, we will fail. But we need to try. When we give up the fight for total liberation, when we are pacified with lifestyle choices and potlucks, our silence casts a vote in support of oppression.
tears and activism, rational responses to irrational behavior
My intellectual and activist work is sometimes described to me in negative terms as emotional and irrational. Prior to this my feminist work was met with the same “crazy cat lady” treatment. I have been addressed as hysterical or overly emotional, because I refuse to not care. And no matter how many coherent arguments I make, I am not taken seriously by many in my line of work and by some of my ‘friends’ and family. My decision to be compassionate, to care about others regardless of whether their lives directly impact me, and my to attempt to live a life that reflects my moral principles is viewed as irrational, zealot-like and overly emotional.
There is a strange belief that rationality is the opposite of emotion and is akin to the status quo. I reject both of these notions. The status quo is rarely developed in accordance with what is rational. People seem to forget that what typically becomes “normal” is rarely rational, as the procedures and institutions and inequalities instilled in any society are to benefit the few in power, not the masses. Rationality is also not the opposite of emotionality. Rationality is associated with science, masculinity and objectivity while emotionality is devalued via being imagined as subjective, erratic and feminine.
A false dichotomy has been created that privileges the former over the later, and this is a problem in two ways. First, the characteristics of masculinity, objectivity and science deserve no privilege over subjectivity or femininity. Second, emotionality and rationality are not opposite ends of a dichotomy, nor are they mutually exclusive ways of engaging with the world. They can coexist and inform one another and, in the case of inequality, having an emotional response to the suffering of others is completely rational. The only thing more rational is to act on those emotions to try to eradicate the inequality.
Activists are people who not only locate and highlight social problems but attempt to change those problems. Activists are the most rational of actors
What is irrational about rejecting needless suffering for the sake of unnecessary things like the accumulations of wealth, aesthetic preferences or culinary preference? What definitely is irrational is to accept the suffering others and to remain silent witness to that suffering in support of a capitalist system of exploitation that oppresses women, ethnic minorities, the poor, non-human animals, and the working class in our own country while perpetuating inequality, starvation, poverty and environmental degradation on a global level.
I am working on a campaign at the moment to get “games” such as the Lobster Zone removed from local bars. Patrons and neighbors come out to ask why we are there and they honestly seem utterly confused as to why we would spend our evenings trying to do something to defend lobsters. They come out and scream at us, laugh at us, and taunt us for caring for the lobsters but I have never seen any of them, even the ones who say they don’t play the game, yell at bar patrons who are actively, openly, and gleefully torturing lobsters. I don’t see their logic in labeling me illogical while they practice a level of violence that cannot be attributed to anything other than wanton cruelty.
What seems irrational is that every second of every day there are millions of cows standing feet deep in their own shit in overcrowded conditions. They are fed grains that are unnatural to digest so that there is somewhere to put the surplus of corn that we produce due to government subsidies that take millions of tax dollars that would be better-spent feeding people. (By the way, the corn is fertilized in a manner originally developed so that there would be somewhere for our government to spray the extra chemicals left over from chemical weapons in World War II). These cows are sick due to standing in their own shit, overpopulation, and unnatural diets. To deal with this farmers pump the cows full of antibiotics. These antibiotics run into the waterways and are in the milk and the meat U.S. citizens consume, which leads to antibiotic resistant strains of disease and illness—leading us to have a sick population. Similarly, the cows are pumped full of hormones so that they can grow very quickly since on these unnatural diets thay can’t even live a year. The hormones enter human populations similar to the antibiotics, creating early onset puberty and increased rates of hormonally linked cancers in our population. (We then torture millions more animals to try to cure these diseases that we have essentially created, and we continue these experiments even though a cure has never been found using animal-based models—but back to the cows…)
The shit-covered cows will then be slaughtered, their e-coli ridden feces winding up in your hamburger because in the name of increased profits production lines are sped up leading to mistakes being made. (Their e-coli ridden feces also runs off into the vegetable fields leading to e-coli outbreaks in spinach and lettuce and other veggies). Also as a result of speedy production lines, workers are injured at alarming rates such that working conditions in US slaughterhouses lead the Human Rights Watch to label it the most dangerous factory job in the U.S. The fast lines also mean that the cows, already forced to suffer a life of torture in cramped, dirty feedlots after being kidnapped form their mothers and refused any form of loving contact, enrichment activity, healthy exercise, or tolerable nutrition, might go through the slaughter line completely coherent and alive. This means after their heavy bodies are hung upside down by one leg and a conveyor belt takes them down a line to be stunned with electricity, they may not die due to being missed by the overburdened worker or the voltage being turned too low (again, in the name of saving money). This means they are coherent as their throat is ripped open with a knife. Hopefully the cut hits them in the right spot and the knife is sharp enough, or they will be alive and slowly bleeding out as they are skinned and their limbs hacked up and their innards gutted.
Every moment for these animals will be sheer pain, torture and hell. The workers who work with them at every step will be overworked and undercompensated. The people who eat their food will risk food-born pathogens and worse. The increase in meat consumption in the U.S. has lead to a proliferation of all the diseases that are the number-one killers in our society—heart disease, diabetes, obesity. To me, this scenario of feeding poisoned crops to animals who are ruthlessly tortured, “growing” these animals in a way that leads to public health tragedies, and then consuming these animals as food even though it leads increased morbidity and disease, is totally and incomprehensibly irrational. Oh yeah, and did I mention that the meat industry does more environmental damage than any other industry on the face of the planet?
[For more on the cow and beef issue read: Omnivores’ Dilemma and watch the video below]
What I do on the other hand seems totally rational. I mourn the loss of these animals, I am angered that people are dying of preventable diseases because they eat these animals, I refuse to eat animals or their byproducts because of my empathetic understanding of the animals’ suffering, my concern for the environment, and for the preservation of my own health. I attempt to educate others about these issues and I speak out and stand up on behalf of the animals who are tortured for irrational reasons by handing out educational materials and protesting those who endorse these industries.
Irrational is that people wear clothes made of fur. Fur production involves severe torture of animals, often skinning animals alive or shoving a rod up their assholes and electrocuting them. (This is after extreme confinement that leads to them going crazy or crude trapping measures, such as leg-hold traps, that often drive animals to try to gnaw off their own limbs in order to survive). All that so that a garment can be produced, even though the heavy chemicals used in its production damages the environment and leads to cancers in tannery workers. This garment will be needless and serve only for aesthetic reasons, as much warmer fabrics have been developed. To me this is absolutely insane and irrational. Protests outside of fur stores seem rational. Activists who free animals caged and slated for death so that they can become articles of conspicuous consumption are acting rationally, whereas imprisoning these activists as terrorists is ludicrous.
Irrational is torturing large animals to the point of mental break-down so that they will do tricks in circuses. Irrational is pretending that zoos teach people about wildlife and conservation. Animals in small cages who are suffering mental and physical health conditions due to their unnatural environment provide no clear insight into the “wild” and often live shorter lives than they would in the wild—they suffer to make money for people. Rational is the parent who refuses to let her or his child go on a field trip to an aquarium or zoo, insisting on instilling and ethic of compassion rather than domination . Irrational is breeding “pets” while over 4 million cats and dogs in the U.S. this year alone will be put to death because no one will provide them a home. Rational is protesting at a pet store that sells animals from puppy mills.
The list goes on, but to summarize: all animal exploitation industries make money off of animals suffering and in the process usually contribute to additional human health and social problems. This is just not rational. Fighting to save these lives and protect others (human and not human) is rational.
The idea that rationality is antithetical to emotion is wrong. Emotion and compassion in no way preclude rationality. In fact, emotion is possibly the greatest catalysts for the most rational reactions to the atrocities mentioned above. The most rational and logical thing a person can do is to value life and to fight for freedom. When learning about any one of the above atrocities it is in no way rational to defend or try to justify the behavior. It is certainly not rational not to react, to refuse to change, and to continue in abusive behaviors compulsively and unreflexively.
Remaining silent is irrational and refusing to change is criminal. The most rational responses are emotions—fear, pain, tears—and the bravest course of action is to react to these emotions by speaking out, fighting back, and by refusing to be complacent.
Vegina 