Others Kill For Us
Janet Kuypers
6/11/19
we meet up at a burger joint;
it was the only chance we could
get together, so here I am.
It was lunchtime, you got, well,
you probably got your usual,
and I just said I’ll have extra fries.
‘Why aren’t you eating?’ he
asked absent-mindedly, and
I said, ‘I’m ... a ... vegetarian,’
and I said it with the same trepidation
I always do, because people think
I’m a freak for not eating dead animal.
These tenuous moments make me feel
like a Bernie Sanders fan at a Trump
rally, or an Atheist meeting the Pope.
And I know, I know people have
been talking about the idea
of eating less meat, but I wonder
if it’s all just talk, or have I just read
it in select newspapers. If people
care, if people read the things I have,
maybe this wouldn’t be such an
uphill battle. But I’m sitting here
with this guy eating a burger
and he doesn’t get what the issue is,
I mean hey, it’s just a burger.
That’s what we humans do.
And I think back to when I was a child,
when I ate meat, because my mother
remembered when her parents,
not from the United States,
scraped enough money together
to purchase a chicken in a cage
that they had to kill, for food
for the family for the week,
because that was enough protein.
So I think about the mass grocery
store chain that provided the dead
animal en masse to this restaurant,
and since I was a little girl, since
back when I had hopes and dreams,
that is when mass consumption won out
over mass compassion. Because since
then lobbyists have paid the USDA off
to say, in charts, in pyramid form,
that we need more meat.
Back in the day animals were raised
humanely, before they were killed
inhumanely, but now mass consumerism
won out over humanity altogether.
Now animals from birth are in such
torturous conditions that they live
on antibiotics, and cannot even
stand on their own legs. The fact is
that these animals have been genetically
altered, so they cannot even have sex
(yes, humans artificially inseminate every
animal used for future slaughter for food)
and because us Americans like
our fatty foods, these animals have
been genetically bred to be so fat
that if they were a human baby, they’d be
six hundred pounds by two months old.
And this is the way we say it’s okay
to let others kill for us, because
we don’t want to get any blood
on our hands. But the blood is
on our hands, and the diseases
from their inhumane treatment
are now in our water, our soil.
More and more diseases are now
jumping from animals to humans,
and you ask me why I’m only
eating French fries in this meal.
It’s the lesser of two evils, I think.
So, the choice, to me, is clear.
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