Ok, sometimes I'm even surprised at myself

There's cute, then there's so cute that you feel a little ill. I like to push the envelope whenever possible. Click for bigger image. However, photobucket is compressing this huge picture, so it's even bigger IRL.

Then there's this little doube entendre. I dunno, does this translate as pasta with red sauce or is cartoon food a difficult concept? Again, click for the bigger image. Anyone want to tell me what an iconic vegan cartoon meal would be?

Vegans Love Life

As always click for the bigger version

Thoughts about Recovery, Trauma, and Comparing Ourselves to Others

A little off topic but this has been on my mind lately.

When I really talk and listen with my friends it’s amazing to me how many of us have been raped or assaulted during our lives. So many of us are carrying around unresolved trauma.

What trauma can do to us when we keep putting off dealing with it is to start to invade our every day lives. Standing at the fax machine the old wound suddenly shouts “pay attention to me now!” At times the intrusions of the past into the present become too persistent and too painful to ignore any longer.

Often in speaking with my friends, someone will say that she doesn’t feel she deserves therapy because her experience was “not that bad.” She thinks that she should be able to “just get over it already.” People who express this view generally compare their trauma to what others have been through. They might concentrate on the worst stories on the news or the harrowing experience of a friend. They judge themselves adversely for being so troubled by something they keep referring to as minor.

On a small scale this might be helpful--realizing the world is bigger than us is a good thing, counting the ways in which we are fortunate is a good thing. But if this self-destructive game causes us to ignore our own hurts, then the result can be bad. Just as accidentally cutting a finger while cooking is nothing compared to someone who loses a limb in a car accident, the assault we lived through may have been less violent, less traumatic, less painful, etc than what others have been through. But like the cut on the finger if we ignore it, then it might get worse. It might become infected, it might fester, it might spread poison to other parts of our bodies or our minds.In a competitive and not always caring culture it's important to remind ourselves that we aren't in a competition with anyone else. We don’t have to live through the worst thing imaginable. We don’t have to prove we’re the strongest, toughest, or most resilient. Our experiences take us where we are, as we are, and we move on from there. To use the accident metaphor again, two people might be in identical accidents, but one might be more seriously hurt. Pre-existing conditions factor in. The help, support, and response immediately following a traumatic factor in. Some people get up and walk away from harrowing falls, another person might trip on the sidewalk and break a bone. Sometimes we won’t ever know why one person might suffer more long term trauma than another.

We are not required to be the best at anything in the world, much less to be the best at recovering from terrible things we never thought could happen. What we should require of ourselves though is to keep working at feeling better. And at some point if ignoring the issue isn’t helping us to feel better, we need to reassess our approach and get the right kind of help and support.

Further, the idea of “not as bad as” has some inherent flaws. While we can say the less the violence the better, usually, each situation brings unique problems. While someone raped by an acquaintance might not struggle with the same level of trauma that someone violently raped by a stranger might face, there could be other fears and other types of psychic injuries involved. One particularly difficult thing about being hurt by someone we know and trust, in some cases by someone we love, is that it can undermine many types of relationships afterward. The lesson contained in it is that we can't trust our own feelings. This means that we are able to love and believe in someone who is capable of purposefully hurting us beyond all imagination. We start to love and trust again, but a nagging voice inside asks if we aren’t being foolish, surely it's safer to not love again.That’s just one example of course, there’s all kinds of fallout from any type of trauma and we should not ignore our own pain. Ignoring the pain can limit our joy in life, it can limit our productivity, it can hold us hostage.

When the motivation is there, the obstacles seem less

I haven't been blogging, but I have been writing. The truth is that I started feeling a little raw and over-exposed. Hopefully I'll boil down what I've been writing, mainly about violence and assault, to something suitable for this forum soon.

But right now I'm going to return to vegan blogging.

Over the holidays I heard that phrase that vegans hear over and over and over and over "I could never give up cheese." I'm amazed that people always feel compelled to tell me this, especially in situations, such as sitting around a table where I'm the only vegan, where I can't really properly respond.

Generally this kind of statement makes me ponder extreme and unlikely situations where the person in question would give up cheese, like needing to climb a mountain every day for a single bite of cheese, or the only available supplier of cheese being a known pedophile who finances his child pornography ring though the cheese business. Yes, given the right reasons or motivations, anyone can give up cheese. Which is not to say that addiction isn't serious or that heroin addicts aren't motivated to quit, I'm just saying this is not as impossible as it seems.

The truth is that I loved cheese too. Honestly probably to the point of an unhealthy addiction. See, I'm allergic to milk, but my allergy is mild. I'd still eat cheese. I'd eat cheese knowing that I'd get an itchy rash later and an upset stomach. I tried to figure out how much cheese I could eat before I'd really regret it. I loved it, I craved it. I knew I shouldn't eat it, but I still did. So I know what cheese tastes like and how difficult it is to give it up.

I went vegan when vegan wasn't cool. Just kidding. When I went vegan there weren't many vegan cheese substitutes and the ones that did exist were expensive enough that I didn't even try them because I didn't have a lot of money. I didn't go out and find something else that satisfied my cheese cravings. I didn't develop a sudden aversion to the taste of cheese.

I just gave it up and after a while I stopped missing it and then a little while longer and I didn't really think about it. Years later cheese smelled strange to me if I happened to encounter it. But none of that happened immediately. I stopped eating cheese but still wanted it.

I gave up cheese very simply because I figured out that the dairy industry is crueler and more harmful than even the beef industry. I figured out that supporting an industry that enslaves female cows in unimaginable conditions until their milk production declines and turns calves into veal was something I couldn't live with.

When I reflect on this, I feel torn. I do think it's helpful to improve vegan foods and get new people to try them. I do feel it's helpful to ask people to cut back on animal products and try new vegan options. On the other hand I wonder if any of that makes a difference without sufficient motivation. Motivation seems to be about making those things we know on a "I've heard it before" level seem real and immediate. Graphic videos do that for some people, they find images harder to dismiss than words. Much in the way that someone will persist in over-eating, even after hearing about high blood pressure and heart attacks, but might suddenly change after a health scare, maybe there is something that can motivate people to finally quit cheese. Only don't count on health to do it--I've seen people sucking down cheese right after heart attacks. It really is a strangely addictive thing.

Sorry for the silence and good news

I've been really, really busy lately but I have some good news. Our smaller white rabbit Jasmine has been sick for several weeks. She had kidney stones. We just got the news that finally the stones have passed and so she doesn't need surgery. She is eating on her own again and feels much, much better. Stones in rabbits are life-threatening since rabbits as herbivores need to eat pretty much continuously to prevent blockages and also because rabbits tend to not do well with surgery. We are very relieved.

Balancing the Feelings of Entitlement

So often when I discuss my veganism with a non-vegan it’s usually because the non-vegan brings it up. Invariably the discussion boils down to “but ____ tastes so good.” Sometimes it gets nasty and people accuse me of trying to force my veganism on others.

For the record: I’m telling you plainly what I believe. That’s called ‘sharing my opinion’ or maybe even advocating. If I were forcing anything there would probably be a gun or a knife involved here.

Ok, that little peeve aside, I have some musings. I’m going to write out my musings without really going toward a point or anything, but instead I’m going to try to figure this out as I go along.

I’ve written here before about some of the unhappy aspects of my childhood, so perhaps I need to state right off that despite everything I enjoyed an incredibly privileged childhood in many respects. I was never homeless for example. I didn’t grow up during a civil war. We always had food, even if it was sometimes less than appetizing. I had that privilege as well to find some foods less than appetizing. Both of my parents are educated. I grew up around books and ideas. I went to school. These are things that many children don’t have obviously.

In that childhood I grew up with certain things I felt entitled to, and at the same time, due to the dysfunctional dynamics of my home life, I also grew up without feeling entitled to other things. So entitlement is a huge issue for me.

I grew up feeling entitled to eat animals. Unlike many vegans I knew I did not spend much of my childhood under the misconception that meat was made in bakeries or somehow magically appeared on grocery shelves. I knew that meat was dead animals, and I felt terrible and even mourned for the animals I loved that were killed and then cooked and put on our table. Yet I felt entitled to eat the bodies of animals. I didn’t think that the animals would have liked to continue living or give consideration to the terrible manner in which they died. So when my friends cling to their current eating habits I recognize something that I used to feel. They feel entitled to eat animals, and they feel like I’m trying to take away something that is rightfully theirs if I bring up the animals themselves.

It’s a strange thing when you consider the things we’re told we aren’t entitled to. I was raised to feel inferior, and as such, made to think I wasn’t entitled to respectful treatment. I was taught that I was not entitled to state my opinions or feelings, even when they were stated in a respectful way.

In college I had a roommate who called herself “a carnivore.” By this she meant that she really only ate meat, and almost no vegetables. She was also Catholic and made a big deal of the idea that during Lent she should not eat meat on Fridays, but she considered this a huge sacrifice. Of course it was alright to eat fish. Anyway, she defended her entitlement to eat animals fiercely. However she dated a guy who spoke to her very disrespectfully and cheated on her. She cried over this relationship, begged him to change, asked what she could do differently. So, on some level she did not feel entitled to a nurturing and respectful relationship. Meat eating she defended fiercely, being treated well just sort of slipped away.

While of course many women do care very much about animals, I sometimes find this odd thing happens when I talk to other women about veganism. Some women imply that veganism is a patriarchal effort to control them. “We’re sick of being told what we can and can’t eat,” they’ll say, “We can eat anything that men eat.” Well, I for one think men should be vegan too, of course. But it’s also interesting that in a climate of demanding or defending the things we should be entitled to, like equal pay, equal access to jobs, protection from violence, equal rights under the law, safe workplaces, etc, that somehow we get stuck in defending this perceived entitlement to exploit others.

Is it because we’re comforting ourselves with some kind of consolation prize to distract ourselves from the heartbreak that it’s been a century and a half since slavery was abolished and yet women and children are still being trapped and sold as slaves here in our midst? Do we feel helpless to combat the terrible things that surround us, powerless even to ask for what we really need and so we cling to the idea that at least we can get a $0.99 burger any time we like? Or is it that when we talk about what we need, what we deserve, what we’re entitled to, we find it hard to shift the topic back to what we owe others, what we ought to do, what others are entitled to?

And then it all comes down to perspective, I guess. I remember reading in feminist magazines or discussing in women’s groups the troublesome role anger played in our lives, and how gender discrimination affected anger. This is one where I have a good deal of personal experience too. I was raised, as many females in our culture are, to believe that it was simply wrong to get angry. Men were allowed to get angry, to express anger, but it was forbidden to women. The fact that I did get angry at times when I was younger was used as evidence that I was simply a bad person, defective on some basic level. And time and time again other women have told me they had the same experience. So collectively we would say “I was denied the basic right to feel my own emotions, I AM angry, I have a right to be angry, and it’s not wrong.”

But the difficulty with anger is contained in how we process it and how we express it. Thus anger is self destructive if we turn it inward, it festers when we try to suppress it, it stagnates if we ruminate on it, and so on. We should be allowed to express anger, but how we express it always matters. So it’s fine to say “I’m really angry because I found out a male co-worker with less experience and less education than I have, in the same exact job I have, is making more than I do.” It’s not ok to go and break that male co-worker’s car windows out because we’re angry.

Aside: It’s also important to think about what we’re entitled to in this scenario. It’s not so much that we’re entitled to the same money (though that’s of course what we tend to focus on) because if the money were always distributed fairly and evenly we might find the resulting increase to be on the low side. However, we are entitled to equal recognition for our accomplishments, we’re entitled to fair treatment, we’re entitled to honesty from our employers.

Back to speaking about anger: Another very difficult thing to accept is that historically while women were denied the right to be angry, this never eliminated their anger, and they found outlets for that anger, often inappropriate ones. So in learning to own our anger it’s not enough to say “Whew, I can finally say how I really feel.” We also need to take care that we don’t hurt others and we need to be aware that for centuries and even today all that suppressed anger is being used to hurt others. It’s ugly to say it, but it’s often true. White women denied the right to express anger at their husbands, their parents, their limited access to education, and their limited employment opportunities sometimes took out all that anger on targets who were unable to fight back, which included racial and religious minorities. Women of any color, any faith, any ethnic background could and did take out their anger on children and non-human animals, and even the elderly, the disabled, and the mentally ill. And of course some women found positive ways to work through their anger as well, in writing, in art, in tireless activism for change, or by throwing themselves into their work.

And I bring all this up because I think that if we consider all the ways in which we’ve been treated unfairly, even violently, we need to keep in our minds that it’s never ok to take those things out on others. We can understand and sympathize with people who’ve been pushed over the edge for whatever reason, but we need to try to hold ourselves back from that edge. If it's wrong for others to treat us this way, it's wrong for us to treat anyone else, including animals, as things, as a means to an end.

All the “shoulds” thrown at us are unfair, like that we should be extremely thin, we should always dress perfectly, and so on. But asking us to not harm animals isn’t another unfair “should” coming from someone who wishes to oppress us. It’s a plea to consider others, to allow compassion into our hearts. It’s asking us that as we rise out of discrimination, we try not to visit violence and death on those still stuck in the realm of “other” and “less than.”

Well, I think I’ll stop now. There’s more I could say on the topic, but this is a start

Happy New Year !

Remember that when we want peace, when we want a non-violent world, that the first step is always with ourselves. We must act with peace and non-violence toward others, including other species, and we must act with non-violence toward the earth as well.