I actually wrote this post 3 years ago but I thought I'd share it here since not many people ever read it and since the feeling resurfaces from time to time.
I'm starting to feel like a person who's been wandering through blinding snow for hours and it's getting cold and I just want to lie down and give in to that tingly, comforting, easy feeling that's sliding up through my legs and into my chest and radiating out through my arms and my fingertips and finally creeping up to my brain, sweet, calming numbness where the wandering can end and everything just becomes EAASSYYY.
Derrick Jensen writes:
"In order for us to maintain our way of living, we must, in a broad sense, tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves. It is not necessary that the lies be particularly believable. The lies act as barriers to truth. These barriers to truth are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities. Truth must at all costs be avoided. When we do allow self-evident truths to percolate past our defenses and into our consciousness, they are treated like so many hand grenades rolling across the dance floor of an improbably macabre party. We try to stay out of harm's way, afraid they will go off, shatter our delusions, and leave us exposed to what we have done to the world and to ourselves, exposed as the hollow people we have become. And so we avoid these truths, these self-evident truths, and continue the dance of world destruction."
I know it sounds depressing and heavy and not something anyone wants to hear but...that leads us so quickly to denial, doesn't it? I don't wanna hear any of this so I'll just tune it out because if I actually took it in right down through my very depths, seeping into the places where I am most vulnerable, I might actually have to DO something; I might actually have to contemplate that grenade going off.
And I so desperately want to DO something. I feel that blanket of indifference, fleecy and cozy and oh so inviting, starting to wrap itself around my senses, starting to buffer me from my rage and my unease and my self-evident truth which tells me, this isn't the world I want to inhabit. But I could so easily blend in, work at my perfectly pleasant job, socialize with my perfectly pleasant friends, perform in perfectly pleasant plays and occasionally raise my voice in protest when my soul suddenly remembers something that just as quickly recedes into nothingness once again. It's just like having hundreds of needles jabbed into your flesh and then twisted over and over again. If you agree to adapt to the violence, to the destruction, to the suffering, if you agree to this numbing deal, then the wounds will heal and the needles will be withdrawn. You can just be grateful things aren't worse, that you, at least, are not being electrocuted or isolated or forced into the slaughtering chute. You can just be grateful. You can just be silent. You can just join the easy, meandering flow. You can just be perfectly pleasant.
And this frightens me so much that I have to jab the needles again and again, reopening sores and feeling my heart break all over again. Jab. Scientists attach electrodes to seven-day-old kittens, then shock them up to 700 times per day for the next 35 days, always during the nursing period. When the mother cat actually discovers that the kittens are being shocked during the feeding process, she does everything possible to thwart the experimenter with her claws, then tries to bite the electric wire and then finally runs as far away as possible from the kittens when electrodes are around their legs. When the electrodes are removed, she caresses and licks the kittens with fierce intensity.
Jab. Dogs given electric shocks while their heads are immobilized in stocks. One of the dogs surviving the shocks for 77 weeks which encourages the scientists to begin shocking him 90 times per minute. The dog dies one hour and fifteen minutes later.
Jab. A steer has a retractable bolt shot into his brain. He falls, sometimes stunned, sometimes dead, sometimes screaming. A worker attaches a chain to his hind leg, he is hoisted to dangle from a suspended rail, blood dripping on the way to another worker who slits his throat. It happens again and again, like clockwork, every half-minute. Tick. Jab. Tick. Jab. Tick. Jab. Tick. Jab. Tick.
Jab. Salmon battering themselves against dams to return home. Jab. Seventy Yanomame Indians shot down in Venezuela for opposing the theft of their land. Jab. Ducks force-fed to engorge their livers to diseased and grotesque proportions. Jab. Polar bears dying. Jab. Chimpanzees slaughtered. Jab. Jab. Jab.
And I know that sitting around, prying open sores does no good for anybody. I know that jabbing other people with needles just makes them resentful and angry. I know that we must be open, inclusive, understanding, patient. How do I explain that to the veal calves confined to crates without one caress, one taste of their mother's milk? How do I explain that to the dog at the end of his chain, circling endlessly for 10 years because "the kids like having him around", the chimpanzees gnawing at their own arms because they've never seen beyond the bars of their laboratory cage or embraced another of their own kind? It is easy to be patient when you are well-fed, warm and loved. It is easy to be patient when the stunner is not aimed at your head. If I was receiving electric shocks 90 times a minute, my whole being would be bent on relief, deliverance, respite and I don't know how well I'd take it if someone whispered to me, "It will stop...in twenty years."
Am I too soft? Am I too weak? Do I FEEL things too much? Yes. All these things. And I don't understand how everyone's heart isn't breaking every moment of the day. If everyone FELT more, would this all continue? Would cows end their days shrink-wrapped, their bodies strewn in bright display, morsels of misery for those picking their way through the minefield. Do not stray from the course because it might be unpleasant in that direction. Would trees be ripped from the ground, pressed into pulp, inked and discarded all within the blink of an eye? Would women be raped, children beaten, dogs drowned, seals bludgeoned, tigers skinned alive?
How do we all live with ourselves? How do I continue to enter words into spreadsheets and turn hundreds of trees into detritus with the tap of a finger? How do I sit here when the 1100th shock has just been administered? We ARE in The Matrix, all these institutions and norms and cultural blinders carefully constructed so that we will not see what lies beneath, so we will not see at what price our indifference. Again, Derrick Jensen:
"What do you do, how tired do you get, when each day you struggle against an entire culture based on the normalization of trauma-inducing behavior? There is no sanctuary."
I have discovered another animal rescue in British Columbia which greatly impresses me. Saints Rescue provides sanctuary for elderly and special needs animals...a cause which holds a very special place in my heart. Their blog is particularly fascinating as, rather than simply describing the animals or sharing adoption stories, the founder and her volunteers discuss philosophical questions about what it means to give of oneself to others, our relationship to non-human animals and other soul-searching issues which many of us ponder but rarely address in a public forum.
