Where there is a will there is a way

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Understanding the sacrifice of eating meat












Ok, here is my take with the modern life (take as in matter or issue, Maori word, said tah-kay): One, we disconnect ourselves from killing what we eat, and pretend that we are now too civilized to kill anything. I for one want to be responsible, know what I am doing, and also to understand what it is I am doing. The closest I have come to understanding what it means to kill another animal for food is watching a program which took very unfit English people to a very traditional upper steppes village in Pakistan (the Shimshal). The people still ate and lived very healthily, they ate mostly lentil dishes with yak butter. Eventually they had the people who were getting better health, and becoming less obese, take care of a yak until at the end, having to watch him be killed in their honour. In the reality program, the obese English people were crying and coming to understand the sacrifice the yak had made-- I think I finally understood that the sacredness about it was to be grateful and respectful for the sacrifice of a living soul, for whatever reason. I think it's simpler than we modern people make it out to be, it's simple, and it is both good and bad.

Anyways, I want to be reconnected to this sacred reality. I don't want everything to not have much feeling to it, like buying polystyrene wrapped red stuff from a big grocery store, and selecting a few people to have the lifelong occupations of killing animals for us. That's weird.

I believe the complexity of modern society is going to devolve back into smaller units again, it's so uncomfortably complex. Like people having chooks (hens) in their yard again. And having a pig, or milking cow.

Another take I have with my culture is the competitive mantra. Like individuals were meant to compete against each other, for the sake of themselves, and that's all fine. There are many reasons why it's not fine. For one thing, it doesn't distribute wealth equally at all, the experiment "of the West" has failed in that way-- and it's also totally destructive on the environment-- bigger better, using more resources, despite not leaving any to regenerate themselves. Screw the next generation, I am stronger than they. But the reason I thought of this today was this intuition I always had about strong men, or strong young people. Some people believe that because they are stronger, they are meant to take this strength and use it for their own purposes, competing against the community. Boys are stronger than girls, and young more than old, so that they can contribute this to the team. You don't run past the old folks and say Aha! Of course people have power in different areas. You don't hold it over each other. It grew to be a valuable part of the team, and is nurtured within the group. Our freedom from the group that we enjoy is a freedom from social group responsibilities-- a freedom which has resulted in this cold world we live in today.

We lie to ourselves about many things, to enable our lifestyle today. We lie about being non-violent, non-killers, we lie to ourselves so we can wield wealth over each other-- be like Donald Trump, smiling smugly as he uses his power for his own self, not the greater community-- as stupid with lack of wisdom as he is cunning with his wits-- and the biggest lie that we tell ourselves, is my final take with our culture:

We lie to ourselves that we can live with such modern luxuries and easiness and escape from the hardships of life because we have outwitted nature, basically. We have made inventions that work so we do not. This was our dream, anyways. But that's not what happened. We live in great luxury because we take what we want from nature, ie we take too much. AND our very wasteful society also depends on many other countries which are "developing" to give us raw materials for not much money, basically to live in poverty below the clouds, overpowered by us, as well (e.g. Brazil with its money crops they need to grow to pay first-world debt). It's a bubble that is going to burst, because we won't see it for ourselves. We live beyond our means, and get a temporary relief from economy in life, from having to labour physically as much, and from having to become skilled and creative (using resources unwastefully requires becoming skilled)-- and do things for ourselves, but since we are using up all these resources, our future children are going to be living with the opposite reality.

Oh, Donald Trump, you stupid man, stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

No comments: