Flesh is not Flesh

                I was discussing the recent death of a patient with one of our doctors at work and to conclude she stated, “Flesh is flesh.  It really doesn’t matter if it’s road kill or a patient here in the end there is no difference.  Flesh is flesh.”  To which I responded, “Except its not.”  The doctor simply was expressing her atheistic worldview and it disturbed me for some time, this even though I would have stated something similar for the same purpose five short years ago.  Conversions change us deeply and that is why I am writing on this topic.

                  Flesh is not flesh.  There is a difference between human beings and animals.  The doctor is a vegetarian but her argument would justify cannibalism.  Why?  Because as much as she wants to elevate animals what she is actually doing and all she can do is dehumanize human beings. 

                Feminists stated they wanted to be like men, but they chose the worst men to want to be like.  Animal activists can only want humans to acknowledge they are animals but that news won’t cause animals to stop eating each other; animals can only be what they are- animals.  Feminists and animal rights activists believe in lazy virtue, they may call it natural virtue but there is nothing natural about virtue.

One cannot be freed of constraints sufficiently to simply create a virtuous individual.  Virtue is the product of sufficiently constraining oneself.  Human beings are the only creatures capable of such an unnatural feat and most of them are not even game for the effort.

People instead desire justification for their own misguided actions.  Bullies have no virtue and that is why they are bullies; but their victims are not conferred virtue by their victimhood.  Many victims themselves become bullies because they feel they have earned the privilege via their own awful experience.  My own experience could be cached in this niche, although my preferred method of revenge has been words bile not sweetness was the fuel.

We justify ourselves, we know too well our justifications.  We lose our empathy in those justifications and we dehumanize our victims.  Just as we make sexual objects we make straw men of every form and so animals seem an innocent receptacle for affection and they become greater than humans for many.  The truth is however they are not; nor are they less than living creatures, they are what they are- animals.

The answer is not projecting a perfect human nature upon animals but acknowledging our own tendencies toward selfish justification and regaining our empathy for other human beings.  For we and they are similar except in the fact that we excuse ourselves and demonize others.  The answer is mercy.

Mercy is the fuel of virtue.  One cannot turn the other cheek unless one realizes that the first strike is never justified and so the answer is not weakness but strength in highlighting that difference, to turn the other cheek.  We must do what is good and elevate the world rather than doing what is justifiable in our own misguided hearts and bringing the world down to a justifiable hell.    

Flesh is not flesh.  There is flesh which has the potential to be more than that and that is our human potential.  It would be unfair to chastise a cat for killing a mouse but it is always tragic when a dog kills a child.  The answer should be obvious but only to a human being.

PETA vs. Dignity

                I was a vegetarian because I wanted to feel humane.  PETA made me reexamine what I was doing and how much humanitarian worth it possessed.  PETA shook my conscience awake about an issue I had not fully seen until they laid it out grotesque and obscene; women should be used, sex and women should be degraded and thus human beings, and especially women, do not matter as much as animals.

                PETA- People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals- let us first start by examining the name itself.  People, we must be unique enough from animals to require some distinction.  This fact is actually promising for animals though; if we were merely animals there would be no talk of ethical treatment.  PETA has made films of slaughterhouses but there are also films made by documentary film crews on every continent of the world showing people how animals tear each other apart in nature.  I don’t believe that lions, tigers, and bears will ever eat tofu, oh my!  If we believe that we should treat our livestock differently that’s one thing, but to see a world in which animals die of old age or from being smothered with hugs is something else entirely, a Disney delusion.

                Animals will never plot in an Orwellian animal farm and there will never be a “Planet of the Apes”.  In fact if apes wish to survive on this planet as a species we must conserve them.  They will not conserve themselves or us for that matter.  We must bear the responsibility for them because we actually can.  They are innocent and thus bear no sin; we, however, do.

                We are different.  We can speak of ethics and actually have a need to.  We do fall and must actually work to be good, but we can and dare I say most of us do.  I may just be optimistic though, a trait that should be chalked up to my humanity, and then there’s PETA.

                PETA offers as commercials, or public service announcements, grotesque portrayals of human sexuality, with particular disregard for women.  Women are most often not afforded the benefit of clothing while they deliver their objections regarding our treatment of animals. Though this may be the only true way to actually dress vegan due to the nature of producing crops, even dare say cotton, in lands which are cultivated from the wild, this is not the reason behind their nudity.

                The reason these women are nude is specifically so they can be exploited for the betterment of animals, though I would posit that the exploitation is not likely to achieve its aim, so in reality it serves no real reason at all. 

                Causing men to lust only makes them less likely to think.  They will only begin to use PETA ads as far as they go without being unsettled. They will feel nothing for the animals because one cannot feel lust and disgust side by side, and guess which one of those emotions will be jettisoned?  As an added bonus to feeling nothing for the animals they will also feel less for women too due to desensitization.

                The ads also try to encourage women to believe that veganism is the way to become sexy, so they too might one day be worthy of their own PETA advert.  Does the term sick emotional blackmail in place of a real argument mean anything to you or did I just make that up?  Oh well it is now a term.  Besides women need to be empowered in order to make a change rather than being pushed towards the emotional eating of delicious saturated animal fat. 

                PETA will not have succeeded in the marketing strategy of making veganism sexy but would have rather simply caused some lustful thoughts and the eating of some desert with no greater end than that.  Doesn’t everyone deserve something more than that?  How can one expect to be taken seriously as an ethicist if one uses such flawed ethics, and logic, for PR? 

                It is disordered to place the well being of animals above the well being of women.  It is further disordered to cheapen sex and thus disregard and disparage the well being of women in a second way.  My personal hope is that women in our culture learn to respect their own dignity and then the ads would just stop because no one would do them in the first place.  Godspeed women, Godspeed.