Meat
The Press
By Mickey Z.
17 November, 2006
Countercurrents.org
For at least five years, I've
been writing a media column for Veg News magazine. A media column? In
a veggie mag? Well, while reading Derrick Jensen's latest book, "Endgame,"
I came across a passage that effectively explains this curious arrangement.
Jensen tells of how the New York Times, after 9/11, published, "profiles
of people killed in the attack on the Word Trade Center." Through
these profiles (which were syndicated throughout the country) readers
learned, for example of the "efficient executive" who "never
forgot the attention to spit and polish, in his work or play,"
and a top stockbroker: a "prankster with a heart" who'd "pull
up next to you in his Porsche-a 911-flip the bird, grin, and take off
in the wind." Jensen's reaction is what I wish to share with you:
"Imagine how our discourse and actions would be different if people
daily detailed for us the lives-the individuality, the small and large
joys and fears and sorrows-of those whom this culture enslaves or kills.
Imagine if we gave these victims that honor, that attention. Imagine
if everyday newspapers carried an account of each child who starves
to death because cities take the resources on which the child's traditional
community has forever depended. She never ran, the article might read,
because she never had the energy, but she loved to be tickled, and loved
to watch her mother, no matter what her mother did. When her mother
carried her in a sling on her back, her large eyes took in every detail
of her surroundings. She loved to smile at her neighbors, and smile
also at little birds that landed on the ground near her mother's feet.
Imagine if we considered her life as valuable as that of the 'efficient
executive,' and if we considered violence against her to as heinous
as we consider violence against him. Imagine, too, if our discourse
included accounts of those nonhumans whose lives this culture makes
unspeakably miserable: the billions of creatures bred for torture in
feedlot, factory farm, or laboratory; the wild creatures worth money,
who are pursued and destroyed no matter where they hide; the wild creatures
unvalued by the economic system, who are eliminated because they are
in the way of production. Imagine if we spoke of the threespine sitckleback,
the Miami blue butterfly, white abalone, spectacled eider, southwestern
willow flycatcher, Holmgren's milkvetch, Pacific pocket mouse, individually
and collectively. Imagine, finally, if we considered their lives as
valuable as our own, and their contribution to the world and to our
neighborhoods to be as valuable as that of a stockbroker-or even moreso-even
if the stockbroker does drive a Porsche, flip us the bird, and take
off like the wind."
So, that's why I write a media column for a vegetarian magazine...
Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net.
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