But I Deserve It!
February 25, 2009 Our grandparents and great-grandparents knew the value of the goods they used and the food they ate. Very often they produced one or the other or even both. So they knew the foolhardiness of waste and superfluous production. They knew the value of money because without hard physical work, they wouldn’t have any. They knew to conserve what they had and to put away for the lean years and emergencies. And they knew that to help their children and grandchildren, they themselves needed to make sacrifices; and this they did out of love.
But it’s tough to grow a country and have a powerful military if people are too focused on living conservatively and producing only what is needed. With the growth of the media—newspapers and magazines, radio, television, the Internet—politicians and businesspeople found a way to entice people to consume more. If you want to remain in power or you want to rapidly increase your company’s bottom line, you must convince citizen consumers that prosperity is about to be theirs. And although they themselves do not yet have enough prosperity, they are within reach of it and if they just keep consuming more, they will get there.
But the problem was that if honorable people who had always lived conservatively and close to the land saw the destruction of that land or of natural resources and the utter neglect of human rights, they might ask difficult questions. They would ask what kind of a world they were leaving for their children, what would happen to moral values, how could growth go on forever, were the farmers and workers receiving fair wages? And so it became necessary for consumers to be increasingly removed from the reality of what the true costs of their consumption was.
Consequently, mining was done in regions where people did not have the political power or financial security to ask difficult questions. Forests were cut down and cleared away for the farms, which were in turn sold and concreted over for suburban housing. Animals were born, raised, and killed in closed buildings where those who were to eat them never saw the suffering or filthy conditions the animals were subjected to. Garbage was removed and buried where citizens couldn’t see it. Potable water was made readily and inexpensively available so people wouldn’t think to ask if the seemingly endless stream would always be available. Or if everyone had enough.
Television, with its mesmerizing plethora of flashing images, became a primary tool in refocusing consumer’s attention. Viewers, now addicted to that screen, avidly watched “reality television,” which bore absolutely no resemblance to the reality of over two-thirds of the world's population who were living near those mines, factory farms, and garbage dumps.
How much of a hold does television have on us?
Nielsen Media Research reported that during the 2005-2006 television year, the average American watched television four hours and thirty-five minutes a day. That equates to 20,000 commercials a year! Anyone who has been in a room with a television turned on knows how difficult it is to not look at it. The best hope for abstaining in such a room is to face away from the screen. This of course becomes increasingly difficult as the screens are becoming as large as some walls in those rooms.
And so we have our world today, a world in which materialism has become the new “Holy Grail,” a world where people are more removed from the reality of what it takes to support their material cravings than ever before. A world in which people have become so focused on gratifying themselves, they have largely stopped asking about the costs to those they share the planet with and the planet itself, and even their own children. A world in which people are at great risk of blithely sailing through life, clueless about the havoc they are creating.
Even good people, caring people, get caught up in the living of life without thinking, without accepting the responsibility to learn how their choices impact others. Even good people can tell themselves that it's okay to indulge themselves, okay to take more than they need, okay to not think of the consequences of their decisions. Even good people can fall into the trap of telling themselves that it's okay because they deserve it.
To which a question arises—what about the others who also "deserve it"?
Reader Comments (2)
It seems to me that the current worldwide recession is trying very hard to reveal to human being that we have done something very wrong。 What has been done wrongly? This reminded me of one of Master Chin Kung's lecture in which he quoted a dialogue between Emperor Lianghui and Mencius - "You have come all the thousand miles of journey to see me, I anticipate you must have ideas with you that will bring profit to my nation." so said the emperor. Mencius replied: "Why your majesty has to aim at profit, Let's only talk on benevolence and righteousness....the nation will be lead to total destruction if the whole population is only fighting for profit...."
Amituofo,
http://molisang.blogspot.com/
So along with many other vegans, I have been sorely disappointed to find that even when I have shown people graphic videos and images of the animal suffering in factory farms and slaughterhouses, the great majority of people, even if they don't like what they see, are not willing to make any changes in their diets and lifestyles. They just carry on eating meat, eggs and milk, as if they didn't know. The same applies to information about the effect of animal agriculture on global warming. Most of the "green" groups refuse to even discuss the issue. It's like a kind of self-hypnosis and a huge social taboo that I've found quite disturbing. It's changed the way I view the human race.
The general consciousness seems to be that if something is socially acceptable, i.e. if most people are doing it, then it must be OK. People are very attached to their traditions, like the "Aussie barbeque" and mostly are very resistant to questioning the value of such a tradition. Even people who I thought were intelligent and those who pride themselves on being radicals, humanitarians free-thinkers have shown this kind of blind indifference and intransigence in the face of evidence of horrific animal suffering. This is a common experience among vegans, and a very disillusioning one. Thankfully, there have also been those who have disproved the rule, even those who have gone vegan overnight when shown the evidence. But overall, it has become easy for me to see how the Holocaust and other human tragedies have occurred when even those who know don't want to know.
There are countless movies and documentaries being made all the time about the Holocaust, and we all watch them and feel what a terrible shame and injustice it all was. And yet there is a holocaust going on right now, with approximately 60 billion land animals killed for "food" every year, as well as untold numbers of sea creatures, and then there are the ones killed in hunting, the fur industry and all the other arenas of carnage. This is hardly ever talked about, and when it is talked about, it's usually lied about, with the media being hand in glove with corporations, ever willing to sanitize their operations and lull the public into complacency.
I'm not saying that vegans are morally perfect and I know we all have our blind spots. I'm just saying that being a vegan in an animal-exploiting world has exposed me to some truths about human psychology that I sometimes wish I didn't have to face. I know that animal exploitation is only one facet of this problem. For anyone who doubts whether a human holocaust could happen again, this article http://www.naturalnews.com/025141.html
discusses the fact that a recent replication of Milgram's shocking but classic 1960s experiments found that 70% of people will torture others if ordered to do so. Only 30% refused to cause pain and suffering to fellow human beings. The majority were willing to administer extremely painful electric shocks to other human beings for no reason other than the fact they were ordered to do so by an apparent authority figure. No doubt most of these people would be viewed as good, law-abiding citizens, and would be loving and dutiful mothers, fathers, sons and daughters. These would probably be no different to the many people who have recently shown such generosity towards the bush fire victims.