Tuesday, January 30, 2001

I've been looking for a pretense to mention EWAV - Enlightenment With A Vengeance. The proprietor and protagonist of this web travel serial is a fellow named Scott Christensen. A couple of years ago, Scott freaked out after several years of 70-hour weeks screwing around with soulless computers and decided he either had to kill himself—or else give away most of his belongings, pile the remainder in his car, and commence criss-crossing the continent numerous times, on something of a spiritual quest. Luckily for us, he chose the latter, and along the way has chronicled his adventures and observations at www.ewav.com.

Scott is an avid cyclist, an (obviously) web traveloguer, computer industry burnout, serious reader, and several other things that endeared him to me. We started corresponding, and soon realized that we were basically each other in parallel universes. That is to say, had things gone slightly worse work-wise, I might have chucked it all and taken off. And had he been offered a Silicon Valley-style equity package, he might have sucked it up and slogged on. So, our acquaintance gave us the unique opportunity to see what our lives might have been like if. Anyway, if you're just dying for more web travel writing, check him out. I particularly recommend the high-bandwidth opening sequence—true web art.

Spent some time yesterday looking up veg restaurants in all my target cities. I must confess, this led to some anxiety about the meals to come. Specifically, I find it increasingly difficult to sit across the table from friends and loved ones and watch them tuck into a corpse. Please note—this is not simple physical revulsion on my part. It is ethical dis-ease. Frankly, it is just very difficult for me to sit and watch people—often people whom I love and respect very much—engage in an activity that I consider deeply morally problematical. It's as if a friend, over dinner, casually recounted beating his wife. How do you react? Your ethics and your personal feelings are suddenly in terrible conflict.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but (after almost ten years of vegetarianism) I'm increasingly of the mind that the killing and devouring of the tens of billions of animals we kill and devour each year is a great evil. I use the term with apologies—but very thoughtfully. My original, personal thinking and positions about the tremendous problems created by the flesh-eating habit (health problems, environmental problems, economic problems) have long been documented here. But a couple of things have strained my sanguinity about the whole thing. One was the philosopher Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation. In it he outlines an ethical position in regard to killing animals. He quotes Jeremy Bentham:

The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of the tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason nor Can they talk but, Can they suffer.

Singer goes on to conclude, in regard to the animals we eat, who have nervous systems that are virtually identical to ours physiologically, that "If a being suffers there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration." He suggests that, "What we must do is bring nonhuman animals within our sphere of moral concern and cease to treat their lives as expendable for whatever trivial purposes we may have."

The other thing I saw recently was a newsletter from PETA. (Another group, like the NRA, and the ACLU, that gets painted with a very broad and dismissive brush, totally regardless of the strength of their core assertions.) It had a lot of veg agitprop, most of which I'd seen before. But it had a picture of chickens on the assembly line. They hung by their feet, and were being run by a spinning blade that slit their throats. (Prior to that, they've had their beaks cut off with a hot knife, to prevent them pecking at each other, in the tiny spaces they're packed into.) Sometimes the blade misses, and the chickens are dumped, alive and conscious, into the boiling liquid that removes their feathers. This machinery runs day and night.

I've long believed that we will all be vegetarian one day. But I've lost patience with the slaughter. So, today, I am politely asking you—yes you—to go vegetarian. To stop torturing, killing, and eating the other animals. If you want, do it for the health reasons. (Vegetarians have the lowest rates of coronary disease of any group in the country, a fraction of the heart attack rate, 40% of the cancer rate, and outlive non-vegetarians by six years.) But do it. If you choose not to, and I love you now, I will love you still. But I am asking. Pleading, really. For goodness sake, stop. We simply don't have the right.

Think what you will of me. This is my carefully and solemnly considered moral position and I intend to stand by it. My cards are on the table.

In other non-news, I'm on jury duty this week. I do take this responsibility of citizenship seriously; but I wish they would come up with some more sensible method of scheduling the thing. Right now, I'm on DefCon 3, or some justice system analog of high alert. When I mentioned this to Pops, he noted that he served not too long ago (as foreman, in fact). And he pointed out an aspect of it that might seem obvious, but which I hadn't considered. He said, here were these twelve people plucked from off the American streets—doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs—and they were just put in charge of what was going to happen to these people in this trial. Whatever they said should happen, was what happened. Not some judge on high, or powerful justice bureaucracy. Just these guys. As Pops pointed out: that's democracy.

This is pretty damned funny. I feel kind of bad passing it around, but I'm pretty sure it's the most entertaining thing in here today. Thanks to Andrea for sending it along. She, come to mention her, is a recently minted vegetarian—and 8 pounds lighter for it!—along with budding converts Alex, and Chad. And also Chad's daughter Kennedy, who made the decision at age six—handily beating Erin's previous record of age eight.

Michael

P.S. I have no doubt some of you will take issue with my flesh-eating jeremiad, via e-mail. I'll be very happy to hear you out; I may be wrong about all this (don't think one doesn't consider the possibility, when virtually the whole world is of a different opinion). By the same token, I'm of course available to try and answer any questions about vegetarianism, or discuss in any regard. fuchs@michaelfuchs.org