In a recent article in The Guardian about Christina Crawford author of Mommy Dearest her groundbreaking book of her abuse at the hands of her famous actress mother Joan Crawford:
“Christina’s own survival was something she achieved almost entirely without the help of outside agencies. In the US, child protection laws were introduced from the 1960s, and the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, creating a single federal focus for preventing and responding to child abuse and neglect, didn’t come into effect until in 1974. Growing up in Hollywood in the 40s and early 50s, Christina had no recourse to the authorities. In fact, after a particularly violent episode she characterizes as her mother “trying to kill me”, it was (Joan) Crawford herself who called the police and asked them to arrest her daughter for delinquency. “I was 13 or 14. And it was then that I realized the world had gone insane. The officer was very kind. He told me that there was nothing he could do because there were no laws to protect me. He told me: ‘You have to try to live [here] until you are 18 and can go free. But, otherwise, if anyone calls me again on you, you’ll have to go to juvenile detention.’”
It was shocking to me (and I am no longer easily shocked) that such child protection legislation just arrived so relatively recently. But attitudes can change quickly and we can go from total blindness to suddenly seeing, so there is hope.
On CBC yesterday there was a radio show about the shrinking moose population in Canada. One of men interviewed who had worked in an environmental capacity for the government expressed his concern as a citizen and a hunter. He said he was very concerned about the moose. He went on to say that even if the solution meant he had to forgo hunting for three or four years to help restore the population he would be willing to do so. This is a truly enlightening and generous stance for a hunter to take, however let us put it into different context before we get too impressed with the magnaminity of this offering. Imagine if he was talking of Jews, or Muslems, Christians, or Black people.
“I am concerned for the (insert minority of your choice). Even if it meant forsaking my hunting tag for three or four years to restore populations to original levels I would do so.”
Such concern for the moose will be of little comfort for the moose. To forsake killing it for three or four years can be viewed as benevolent only if we accept the underlying premise that of course it is morally acceptable to kill it to begin with. What an unquestioned right underlies this generosity.
“I would be willing to forsake killing (Blacks, Moslems, Jews, Christians) for three or four years if it could return the population to previous levels.”
At which point we would resume killing them with a clearer conscience with the knowledge we are preserving the pool from which our killing can continue.
We clear forests, fields, and wetlands to make way for our suburbs, housing developments, factories, farms and cities without a thought to the thousands of beings crushed, maimed and displaced by these activities. We do these things without thought because we learnt these things were not the proper place for our concerns. The whole subject never comes up and so we do not think about it. They are beneath the threshold of our concern and to bring them up seems ludicrous. “What? I need to consider the squirrel, chipmunk and bird nests in every tree I cut down? I should worry about the mice, moles and woodchucks underground who may be crushed and suffocated by bulldozers in digging the foundations for my house?”
“How could I build anything if I worried about such things?”
How indeed? What would this earth look like if these things were not beneath consideration? What if these ignored beings were considered persons rather than irrelevant things whose lives were not even worth thinking about if considering them impedes us?
Someday we will look back on our attitudes toward the non-human peoples of the world in horror. They are in the same place we once reserved for Black people, Native Americans, non-christians of all kinds, and even children.
We literally think we are god’s gift. And this god who coincidentally looks just like us (if we are white and a male) was the one who gave us the divine right to dominate, rule over, and ignore, all the living beings who live on this planet that do not look like us. Is there a greater arrogance imaginable?
To talk of these others as “people” or “persons” seems ridiculous. It seems self-evidently absurd. We are the only “people” or “persons” on the planet, the rest are “mere animals”.
May I suggest you go out and really look at a cow, a pig, a cat, a dog, or a deer, and see what is really there in front of you, as opposed to what you assume is there. If you truly look, as if you are looking for the first time (which is exactly what you will be doing), you will see a person as sensitive, and as thoughtful as yourself – perhaps more so. But first you must ask yourself, who do you think you are? And the corollary, who do you think they are? Nothing is as it seems.
The Vegan Manifesto 