Don't defend a point of view, collectively fight the system!

I don’t want to have the conversation any more about whether someone 'should be able to eat their sausages without being made to feel bad about it'. That sentence in itself is a distraction into the rights and wrongs of killing, whose meat it is and if people feel bad it might be their own conscience etc.

But I do not have a bone to pick with these individuals, people fishing on the shore for a fish for tea, small holders, poorer shoppers who have to buy cheap and nasty and little egg-eating households who have chickens 'out the back'. People are all on their life journey, mindful in various ways of their choices and impact.

The problem is when things are scaled up and up and we become removed or anaesthetized to the truth of the food, chemical and farming industries.

 

It is the SYSTEM that must change. The system absorbs the sounds of unspeakable suffering in intolerable conditions. The slavery of millions of lives. And yes they are alive. Each has a face, two eyes, a heart beat, a life force, sensitive skin, bones that can break, hair that falls out with stress, they need the colostrum like our babies too. They need daylight and room to roam. They should be allowed to run for their lives in free and fair combat or take flight, not ushered via metal crushes and electric prods, beaten, gassed and knifed. They don’t need the vaccines, the antibiotics, the separation, the exporting, the abbatoir…they need all those things like a hole in the head.

So do not give that system any unconscious support.  If it is cheap meat or no meat, choose no meat. If it is veal or liver pate or not free range or organic put those things into your equation and stay clear. Veal involves being chained indoors to produce white muscle-free meat. Pate involves force feeding ducks with a large syringe until their livers burst. Juxtapose that to the ducks on the river to whom you would throw the crusts of your bread. Always try and be kind or at least let other lives be. If it is not free-range it means that the animals are kept in warehouses all their lives. Chickens need only access through a vent with 20,000 other birds to a mini outdoor space to be called free range so don’t fall for every label. If meat is organic, it means that the animals have not been fed grain that has been laced with pesticide. They are not grazed on chemically enhanced grass and they have not been given jabs and other pharmaceutical toxins that never break down in the body and become accumulated in yours. Bear in mind, antibiotics will no longer work if they are being used on such a grand scale.

Don’t buy from big companies and don’t kid yourself that beef from happy cows and pork from happy pigs is a true story.  Let yourself look, consider and care. Your internal integrity will grow and with it your wellbeing. They say consumers are the most effective activists. If we don’t buy, they can’t sell it and the system will be finished. Don’t turn your back on appalling treatment of anyone. 

One man has gone up in my esteem when he was already a hero. He was a top footballer back in the day but last night I heard that he was the only one who approached the abusive family man on our corner. We had all heard the yelping and screams from the dog run where several children and animals lived. In those days you said nothing but this man went straight up to the father and said ‘I will clatter if you lay a hand again on your wife, children or any of those animals.’ This is the energy of change, calling things out for what they are, refusing to silently participate.   

As Aristotle said,

‘Happy is the man who passionately defends that which he loves’

Come to notice and love all life.