A Jolly Halloween wish...

Enjoy your Halloween please. If you like "vintage" images

such as these...

You can see lots more images here.


For those who prefer some horror to accompany their Halloween, you can take a look (open a pdf table) at the results of the ghoulish and murderous behavior of the "wildlife services" department, financed by our tax money, at this link.

Remember...if you don't want to be a meanie this Halloween or any other time...please live as an ethical vegan.

What might have been...

Recently I saw a documentary produced and directed by Rory Kennedy titled "Ethel". The documentary is ostensibly about the wife of Robert F. Kennedy and Rory Kennedy, the documentary producer, is also the youngest child of Robert Kennedy. So the film is theoretically about the directors mom...but actually you see lots of her dad in it too.

Robert's wife Ethel was slightly pregnant at the time of his murder and Rory Kennedy was born many months after her father died so she never knew him. She was raised by her mother and this was, I thought, what she was attempting to highlight in the work...that no matter the legacy of her father Robert...it was Ethel who raised the children after his murder and passed on whatever foundations and values they have.

One thing I didn't remember was that while Robert Kennedy was the Attorney General of the United States, his wife Ethel was arrested and charged with and tried in court for horse theft. She had found several starving and neglected horses in a barn and brought them to her place to care for them. Apparently the owner of the horses pressed charges against her.  

What might have been? One thing the film touched on was Robert Kennedy's strong friendship with a personal hero of mine....Cesar Chavez.  And Mr. Chavez was a hero of mine from way way back to the great grape boycott of the 1960's. Mr. Chavez was a strong supporter of human rights and justice as was Mr. Kennedy. Mr. Chavez became enlightened enough, eventually, to extend his understanding of justice and rights to other animals....and at the last of his life he lived as an ethical vegan.

JFK, MLK, RFK (John F. Kennedy, Martin L. King and Robert F. Kennedy)...three sets of initials belonging to three different men...but all appeared to live lives where the pursuit of and support of human rights and justice for all human animals was a very very important value to them. All three of these men were murdered during a brief (less than 5 year span) period while I was a young man. I was reminded of the hope and belief that existed for a time (before their murders) that this country would actually strive to live up to the ideal of "created equal". I was reminded of the despair and sorrow and sense of loss their murders elicited in me...and in a real way that still resides in me and I truly believe the United States and the world would be a very different place had those men not been murdered.

None of those three were vegans...but Robert's good friend Cesar Chavez came to veganism later in his life. MLK's widow, Coretta Scott King, came to veganism later in her life as did their son, Dexter Scott King. People devoted to human equality and human rights and human justice realized that those notions of rights and justice belong to all living beings....not just human beings. What might have been had those three advocates not been murdered? We murdered three of the best of ourselves. And we did it...no "foreign enemy", no "evil outsiders". Their deaths represent, to me, a far far greater tragedy and loss and wounding than anything that has happened to this nation since then.

And...it just might be...that our fellow animals were harmed just as deeply as we were....what might have been had one or more of those folks lived to evolve into advocates for ethical veganism.



  

Haunted...

is a reasonably good word (and seasonable...seeing as how this is the month of Halloween...but make no mistake...this is about horror but not a fun horror) to describe my reaction to this post over on the very fine Animal Rights blog.

I'm going to reproduce it here because it is not too long and I think it should be reproduced....again and again.

The post:

My Vegetarian Child and Her Melt-Down

Came home last night to 6 year-old kid on couch, sobbing her head off.  Husband tells me it's because of a scene in the movie they're watching, in which two dogs (cartoon dogs) fight --and one almost falls of a cliff.

She's just bawling.
I sit between them and look at Husband, bewildered.  He whispers, "She's also upset about Thanksgiving."

I whisper, "What? Why?" before the epiphany hits that they're probably talking about turkeys at school and daycare all the live-long day.

He whispers, "The turkeys."

Of course she hears us; we're right there.  And she just Loses her Shit.  Oh my god.

"Why do people eat animals? why why why why why? I wish the whole world were vegetarian. Why why why why why??"

She's just sobbing. Her eyes are puffing up and everything.

I'm so saddened and so surprised, as I always am, because I just try to play this vegetarian/vegan life we have on the down-low.  She asked me last week if she could have the chocolate milk at school on Fridays and I said yes.   But, of her own accord, she is consuming fewer and fewer animal products.

Then, she reminded me of the story she told me last year, about one of her friend's uncles shooting a bear.  "For a carpet!" she sobs last night.  "He killed a bear for a carpet!"
Then, she's inarticulate for a while.

I look at Husband.  Part of me wanted to whisper, "She doesn't know the half of it" ( but I remembered her excellent hearing.  I thought to myself:  imagine if she heard what I just heard at my meeting at the Humane Society).


She cheered up a bit when I told her that more and more people were stopping eating meat and that more and more people were reducing it in their diets.  And that I just came from a place where people love animals too.

She liked that.  (I had recently talked to a friend who told me his 12-year old boy was freaking out about climate change. I told him to tell him about activists for the environment, that people were working hard for it.  He thought that was a good idea.)

Then, I gave her a candy I managed to dig out of the bottom of my bag (might've been older than she was).  She chewed it quietly and calmed down.

I felt wretched.  I still do.  I had never wanted to make her so sad.  I am trying to figure this out.

One of the things that isn't often talked about when we consider ethical veganism is the suffering and horror that is inflicted on human children as they are made into unwitting bystanders and/or accomplices in the depravity that is at the heart of exploiting and killing sentient beings for profit or fun.

The suffering and misery and pain we inflict on our fellow animals doesn't stop just with them...when our children realize what is happening they are tainted by that knowledge and they feel pain too.

Are we witless? Doesn't the sorrow of this human child...of all the human children tell us something? Instead of stopping and changing our behavior we try to hide it from them...we lie to them...we distort reality for them. We damage their ability to clearly perceive the world around them. We do all these things to ourselves too but doing these sorts of reality-scuttling operations on children is much worse because it deforms them as they grow...it twists how they see the world...it blinds them and makes them crooked. They look to us to help them comprehend their world...and we gift them with lies and distortions and minimizations and avoidances and euphemisms.

We all were once them, and each of us who came to veganism as adults, we each have had to struggle with seeing clearly, with regaining our sight, as it were, with being able to see our behavior toward other animals as it is...not as we were told it was. We were gifted with the added misery of having to accept our own complicity in the ongoing horror story of we human animals. All because we got twisted when we were small. And part of the reason we got twisted was because no one wants to cause a small child pain. No parent wants to see their child in misery....no society wants to see its children suffering. But our parents and our society cheated...instead of evaluating and changing the behaviors that caused the misery...they lied...they hid things...they distorted...they sabotaged reality and in so doing they damaged our ability to see....to comprehend...to know.

The original harm...exploiting and hurting and killing our fellow animals was compounded by more harm...by lying and hiding and twisting what we were doing...instead of just stopping the harming.

I'm upset tremendously simply by writing about this...I have thought about this post over and over ever since I read it. There's a big big truth here if only we will not hide it from ourselves.

The mother writes that she had never wanted to make her child so sad...she didn't...the truth made her child sad. And we have fashioned a truth...the truth of our treatment of our fellow animals into a truth that is sad...that should make anyone sad. Anything that sad and terrible demands that it be ended...that it be changed, most especially since it is unnecessary...it does not have to be that way.

But...those that create this truth generally don't feel that sadness...they hide from it....they hide it from themselves...but it doesn't disappear...it doesn't become any less sad because of the hiding or avoiding. It sits there waiting, becoming more and more monstrous the longer it continues...waiting to be encountered by an innocent child's eyes and heart...and it wounds her just as it wounds all of us. But hers is a special wounding because she is powerless and guiltless and innocent. She had no hand in making it this way. It is our legacy to her...and it is a miserable thing.

Shame on us...shame on those who harm...shame on those who use our animal relatives...for goodness sake! We can do better than this, we can't leave the world in the hands of the liars and the wounders and the hurters and the killers and the profiteers and the thieves. We mustn't. We owe this little girl much more than that...we owe our fellow animals much more than that...we owe our planet much more than that....we even owe ourselves much more than that.

I admire and respect these parents so very much. I have no doubt that human beings as a whole would be a much better and kinder and brighter group if all parents were like these. I can only ache for them and thank them and apologize to them and their daughter for the behavior of my fellow human animals. Living as an ethical vegan means not inflicting gratuitous misery on our fellow animals...it also means not inflicting gratuitous misery on our own children either.