Blog 10

How We Kill

In Margaret Atwood’s book, The Handmaid’s Tale, June and her husband are plotting their escape from a religious/fascist dystopia called Gilead. When they get to the border they will claim they are just going for a daytrip. They will take no luggage so it will look plausible. Her husband begins to think about their beloved cat. Obviously on a day trip they wouldn’t be taking their cat with them. But if they leave it behind its meowing might attract attention and arouse suspicion. Perhaps they could give it away? No this would only arouse more suspicion and in such dangerous times no one can be trusted. Finally the husband speaks up:

“I’ll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her I knew he meant kill.That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before.You do that first in your head, and then you make it real. So that’s how they do it, I thought. I seemed never to have known that before.”

How we have arrived at this current place and time is a very long story. How we have converted other sensitive living beings – our fellow travellers on this planet – into “its”, and then gone further and converted trillions of them into nothing at all, is a psycho/social act of magic that is almost incomprehensible. Of course we have done it before to blacks, Native Americans, Jews, Gypsies. Yet never on this scale, and never have so many participated on a daily basis.

We have become a global world of Hamlets. We know, and yet we do not know. We believe, and yet disbelieve. We live somewhere in between, in a strange semi consciousness, a semi-willed fog of “sort of” ignorance. We feel unable to act. We know we should not be cruel to “animals” and most of us would not deliberately inflict horrible cruelty on an “animal”. However most of us really do know what goes on out of sight (but not really out of mind), in the factory farms and abattoirs. We know it is horrible, incessant cruelty but we pretend not to know, we put it out of consciousness, we put it in a back dusty corner somewhere, we become willfully blind, and think we cannot act. We have become paralyzed. The Constitution is crumbling before our eyes and the Nazis are rebuilding in the United States and much of Europe and we pretend (as we did once before), this can’t be really happening. We have become so used to being passive consumers – of everything – that any action seems alien to us. We are provided food by others, our clothing and housing is provided by others, our entertainment is provided by others. Our government is provided by others. We sit and we watch. We sit and we consume. We sit and we are told what to think and what to do. We are not supposed to decide anything, except what brand to buy, and most of us don’t. But what we are doing is allowing the worst atrocities in the history of the world to continue.

It is not really that hard to change. There really is no loss in changing and giving up “meat”. To the contrary, here is so much to gain. Better health, better tasting food, better peace of mind, greater self-respect, and a contribution to the whole world at large. The only sacrifice is losing an ignorance that you really don’t have to begin with. It is giving up a crippling self-delusion.  It is giving up a terrible habit of passivity that you are far better to leave behind. It is not that you do not know. You do. We can live a more ethical life where we have agency.  This has nothing to do with being perfect; it just means being a bit better, a bit kinder, and a bit less paralyzed. We can do this, and we must.