On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero -
"Go home, kill Mom and Dad and then hang yourself."
Stokely Carmichael, answering the question of a white middle class youth, how they, the white middle class youths, could help the blacks.
I just love black humor!
Now this was in the good old days, before PC gave racism a bad name and before white lives did matter.
But that idea of self-termination is still a pretty valid idea if you think it through. The fucking planet would be much better off if we would all make this small change to our life.
Instead of the poor planet having to send earthquakes and tsunamis, hurricanes and volcano eruptions, droughts and bad harvests and shit, trying to rid itself of that surface nuisance, that evolutionary cul-de-sac called mankind, it could just relax and enjoy itself again, just like it was before the first ape thought it would be cool to walk upright.
The problem with this is that I am not really a doer, so killing myself is not an option, I´m more of a let-it-be-er. That´s probably why the Indian idea of renunciation strikes such a chord with me. The Anti-Nike! Just don´t do it!
So on the 4th of December in 2004 I stopped eating animals.
The reason I did this was because I joined a Yoga ashram in Germany that day, it was one of the rules of conduct there, it was not on the menu, and if you were caught eating meat somewhere outside, you would get kicked out and since I did not want to do it in secret and/or become a hypocrite and lie about it, I just stopped.
When I left the ashram in 2014, after almost 10 years of pretending to love all beings, I did not go back to my old ways of eating animals, why would I? Nothing to it but to not do it.
So if you look at statistics of German meat consumption, I have saved countless lives in all those years, have not used up lots of resources like water, land and plants for the production of my steak, and overall been a pretty good guy.
The biggest animal I´ve ever killed was a 50 cm long pike, during my juvenile fishing years. I guess, killing is a rite of passage also, gotta do it, if you want to become a real man. It´s that reptile brain thing.
It was a weird moment though, one moment the fish alive, next moment dead, and I was the guy who did it.
But at least I killed what I ate.
Eating goose around Christmas time is a big thing in Germany.
Restaurants offer whole-goose-dinner-specials for groups of people, magazines dish out goose recipes, people buy goose for their Christmas dinner, there´s a bit of a goose frenzy during that time of the year.
So last year a video went viral where one farmer was selling beautiful, healthy, radiant, organic, free roaming, white, alive geese on a market. People could choose their bird and then the farmer would kill it, pluck it, etc. and hand over the corpse to the customer. A TV crew was filming everything and it was so weird.
Some women where crying, shocked to see the killing, the production of their Christmas roast, up close and personal, in yer face. Obviously they preferred to get their fix in the sterile, clinical environment of a supermarket, where the end product is nicely packed, often bears little to no resemblance to the animal it came from and the customer is very far away from the actual killing, which is usually done by poorly paid Eastern Europeans in big slaughter houses.
Some people said it was good to be reminded what it means to be eating meat, that animals have to die for it and events like slaughtering in public would make people more aware of that fact and maybe lead to a more conscious consumption of meat.
I guess if people had to kill animals themselves, there would be many more vegetarians.
That was maybe the rationale behind a teacher visiting a slaughterhouse with his class, so the kids could see how their burgers were produced.
Boy, did this guy get into trouble afterwards! Some kids got traumatized, parents were up in arms, the director was not amused, the usual drama.
Medicine must be bitter or it´s no use. - German proverb
Apart from not eating animals, I don´t have a car, don´t go to Starbucks, McDonald´s or other outbursts of American imperialism, don´t watch TV, don´t read the papers or listen to any kind of state propaganda, don´t vote, don´t smoke, don´t drink alcohol, and I don´t do to others what I don´t want them to do to me.
So I have given you a few examples of stuff which, if you didn´t do it, would make the world a better place if everyone did the same act of non-doing.
And it´s so easy. Just don´t do it!
Don´t Kill is so much easier than Love Thy Neighbour.
@ecotrain
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