Let’s be honest. The activities of our economic and social system are killing the planet. Even if we confine ourselves merely to humans, these activities are causing an unprecedented privation, as hundreds of millions of people-and today more than yesterday, with probably more tomorrow-go their entire lives with never enough to eat. Yet curiously, none of this seems to stir us to significant action.
Unless you are a new arrival from another planet, you have probably heard or read at least one of the following claims (among other possibilities):
Once upon a time—in 1973, to be precise—Peter Singer suggested birth control for free-living animals as part of the “animal liberation” philosophy. Parenthetically at first. Publicly asked whether gazelles should be protected from lions, Singer replied in a letter for the New York Review of Books:
Who will remember what this age was like? And how will it be remembered? For the abyss of silence at the center of all the noise? The fierce shadow cast by all the blazing lights that never went off, that shone night and day?
I just substitute taught
music to kindergarteners
crazy wild-haired college teacher
radical journalist, fifty-seven
so many lamentations . . . .
“I was in that Mexican town
when it was just a sleepy
fishing village . . . or climbed into a cloud
forest in Vietnam when the f
was still in forest and c did
not mean contaminants … and
off Belize, you can’t imagine the lemon
sharks, before the Asians ramped up
shark-fin soup . . . .”
*-*
there were bongos
xylophones
tambourines
At last Plantman was led to the vault of The Accused. The walls and door were three feet thick, but the vault was air-conditioned, lest The Accused succumb before The City could legally VOID him. The Official punched the key-code and the door yawned open, revealing a cot, a toilet, and a small table which held The Accused’s beloved African Violet, “Rose.”
The night before he was Accused, The Not-Yet-Accused lay awake, troubled by thoughts. His Sunday night routine. The Wife slept soundly. The pills hadn’t worked— on him. Nor had the wine. He resorted to television. Disturbed. No program soothed. Until the twenty-four-hour Hunting and Fishing channel.
Three men in a boat. Large lake, peaceful. The men spoke softly, each phrase stretched loose by long, slow diphthongs of The Nation’s South. It was early morning, where they were. Foamy tongues of water lapped the boat-side. Seductively. Rhythmically.
Epics of the Deep, was a typical Big Media over-production, but interesting in its implications: The Mad Cetologist gets hold of TKI Technologies’ Pyramid Human-Animal Language Translator (HALT), used to prove to vegetarians, “animal liberation” activists and other Viral Deviants, that while animals have a certain instinctual “intelligence,” they are far from human, and their liberation would not only result in a dearth of protein for the Citizens of The Nation, but the animals’ certain death from car accidents, starvation, not to mention immense health hazards caused allowing pigs, cows,
I’m used to feelings of rage and nausea whenever I open a “news” paper – which is something I usually do only once a week; and I only do it then because The Times’ Saturday edition has a good puzzles page, and it also provides the TV listings for the following week. I most certainly do not do it for what should be the main purpose of a newspaper – providing good information about the world around me.
… and a Guaranteed Profit for the Corporations and Bankers regardless of the opinions or outcomes of public protests.
A Tale of Milk and Honey from the UK/EU Homeland
Did you read the one by George on the TTIP negotiations?
Yep, so did I.
Worried?
Me too.
