So you start off being nice to everything. Kind to animals, kind to people; murder completely out of the question. You see yourself as moral and your morality means no death and torture.
Then you think, hey, a steak or a fried egg every so often is pretty good, so suddenly a little death isn't that bad. You don't have to kill and you don't have to see the killing, so why not. And if it's $2.95 for eggs from chickens cramped in cages with their beaks cut off or $4.20 for one that sauntered around a field, you're going to start justifying the cage pretty quickly too.
Then you drive to work late and someone cuts you off in traffic so you call him a fucking asshole. This stranger. This person who just thought they could nip out in front of you because they had been patiently waiting for almost 10 minutes, staring at lines of cars filing past. Suddenly all your rage and wrath rises and is focused on them. But that's not who you think you are. It's not who you wanted to be when you got out of bed in the morning. You're moral.
So to keep your title you redefine your morality. If you're wrong and you want to be right, the easiest thing to do is change your definitions. You say for pain and death, animals don't count. Not tasty ones. Maybe dogs and pandas because they're cute. With people you can shout at them but not hit someone. Unless there's a war. Then you can kill everyone, and probably should.
And so your childhood fantasy of being a friend to all peels away over the course of a Tuesday morning until you realise that the real world is not governed by what you should do, but by what you can do. The language of well meaning that decides how you see things peels away like skin off a carcass and leaves the flesh of life beneath, terrifying, nurishing, and real.
Then you think, hey, a steak or a fried egg every so often is pretty good, so suddenly a little death isn't that bad. You don't have to kill and you don't have to see the killing, so why not. And if it's $2.95 for eggs from chickens cramped in cages with their beaks cut off or $4.20 for one that sauntered around a field, you're going to start justifying the cage pretty quickly too.
Then you drive to work late and someone cuts you off in traffic so you call him a fucking asshole. This stranger. This person who just thought they could nip out in front of you because they had been patiently waiting for almost 10 minutes, staring at lines of cars filing past. Suddenly all your rage and wrath rises and is focused on them. But that's not who you think you are. It's not who you wanted to be when you got out of bed in the morning. You're moral.
So to keep your title you redefine your morality. If you're wrong and you want to be right, the easiest thing to do is change your definitions. You say for pain and death, animals don't count. Not tasty ones. Maybe dogs and pandas because they're cute. With people you can shout at them but not hit someone. Unless there's a war. Then you can kill everyone, and probably should.
And so your childhood fantasy of being a friend to all peels away over the course of a Tuesday morning until you realise that the real world is not governed by what you should do, but by what you can do. The language of well meaning that decides how you see things peels away like skin off a carcass and leaves the flesh of life beneath, terrifying, nurishing, and real.
