Carnism

"Psychic numbing is a psychological process by which we disconnect, mentally and emotionally, from our experience...[it] is not evil; it is a normal, inevitable part of daily life, enabling us to function in a violent and unpredictable world..." (365)

Have we forgotten the suffering in Darfur?

faculty.fairfield.edu

It is extraordinarily difficult to handle evil. Evil exists in the world, but humans tend to be delicate, our mental and emotional capacities vulnerable to pain. What is our problem?

Empathy. We feel too much. We can't handle thinking of the innocent people in Darfur dying daily in horrid concentration camps. We can't think about child soldiers in Uganda, abducted in the middle of the night, forced to commit and see brutal acts, then sent forth to kill, maim, and abduct other children. We can't think about the bloodshed sporadically erupting in Palestine and Israel. We can't think about the victims of flooding in Pakistan who are still struggling to put their lives together as the initial wave of donations falls away.

There are so many tragedies around the world, wars and natural disasters and human conflict. If we were to fully open ourselves and be vulnerable to feeling all the pain that exists in the world, I honestly don't think we could handle it. So we shut that part of us down. We instead reduce everyone to numbers and statistics, forget about issues after a week or two, and go back to our normal lives.

If we take a look at our daily lives, we'll see the practice is the same. We eat meat. We eat animals.

What is in this cow's future?

smh.com.au

"People may dislike broccoli, but nobody is ever disgusted by the thought of eating it. Could it be that the disgust is in fact a displacement? I am thinking of an early disgust (which many children share) at the very thought of ingesting a corpse that was once a living being." (394)

Last Saturday, October 23, I watched Food, Inc. It was thoroughly enlightening, and thoroughly disgusting. I couldn't look at meat the same way, and refused to eat it. I wasn't thinking of the future, I wasn't taking on the label of a vegetarian, I was just responding instinctively to a feeling of disgust when I thought of the meat industry. As well as the corn industry and practically every other major food processing industry. Then, that Thursday, we watched the beginning of Earthlings. Did I ever say that I hate blood? Well, I do. It makes me nauseous. I could barely watch Earthlings, but I made myself when I could.

That reinforced my new aversion to meat. I don't know if this is permanent. I don't know how long it will last. I happen to believe that the Food Chain exists for a reason - there would be overpopulation of every species if there wasn't a natural order in place to keep the planet in equilibrium. Animals eat other animals. We are animals too, and have our place in that order. However, there is no reason for cruelty to be part of that order. I have not eaten meat for over a week, and I have no idea where this is going to go - as for now, I can't help but see visions of Earthlings - not necessarily a face, but images of evil, on my plate.