The Past Is The Present

Remember back in the day when it was cool to smoke? Oh man, those sloe-eyed sultry women who could inhale through their nostrils were my idols! Clicking open the shiny silver cigarette case, flicking the gold-plated zippo, inhaling the first whiffs of butane, then “zoopf” the flame itself, six inches high, dazzling in its initial flash, then the first tendrils of smoke curling around a glowing end.

It was pure Hollywood, peeps, and I was a part of it. So were many, many of my friends, starting in our early to mid-teens. There was a law about age, you had to be 16, but no one enforced it. Unless you looked about five years old, no one refused to sell anyone cigarettes. In fact, even if you were five years old, all you had to say was you were buying them for your parent or grandparent, and boom, away you went with a little box of death that in the late 70s cost about $2.

In the 80s, the health and welfare party poopers got real hot and heavy over the health risks of smoking, and in 1988 new legislation was passed requiring cigarette packages to list certain health warnings and it just snowballed from there, peeps. Before long, the age was raised again (and people actually checked ID this time around!), smoking was banned in public places, then in the workplace, then gruesome images graced the boxes. People were quitting left and right, like passengers jumping off a sinking ship. Tobacco companies rallied, but the health conscious boomers were stronger and today, smoking is persona-non-gratis everywhere.

But let me tell you, the uproar! The initial hue and cry! Campaigns about curtailing our rights to choose, personal freedoms, the financial impact on tobacco companies and tobacco farmers, oh the humanity! It was not a popular concept at first. Our health was less important than the income generated from the industry – I mean, how were these rich tobacco families going to continue to live their extravagant lifestyle? Would they have to sell a yacht or two? Perhaps they’d have to forgo a few vacations or budget for Christmas?

Eventually, those companies either rallied and diversified or they died out. But life went on, and the quality of life for many was so much better. Today, we recognize how bad smoking is for us, and the memories of the turmoil of the 80s and 90s, as changes were made, has faded.

I feel like this scenario is playing out again, peeps.

But this time, it’s with meat and dairy.

Think about it: animal agriculture is a huge part of our world. It’s not bread that is the mainstay of cultures around the world, it’s meat. Our diets are meat rich for the most part. Rarely does the average family have a meal that is not meat-centric with a side or two of high-fat carbs.

So think of animal agriculture today as the tobacco industry of yore; and the way people fight to continue to eat meat despite medical organizations and World Health Organization’s (WHO) warnings about the risks of eating meat.

Society at large does not appreciate the truths about eating meat, the same as they repudiated the truths about smoking back in the day.

I can see it now: suddenly, all meat packaging starts to carry warnings as to the health risks associated with its consumption, maybe even gruesome pictures of colorectal cancer and plugged up arteries.

Animal ag farmers and dairy producers are already crying foul as activists storm their facilities and expose their deplorable conditions and abusive methods. They are opening their arsenal of propaganda to fight to maintain their position financially and ethically, just like tobacco companies did way back. Billboards are going up for both sides, peeps, using the highways as battlegrounds, and slogans as weapons. 

It seemed like an unwinnable war, for either side, until I recalled the tobacco issued and suddenly saw a resemblance between the two.

Now I know who will win (at least a majority) because the writing is on the proverbial wall, peeps. Been there, done that.

Health and welfare will start to take the lead, as usual; and anti-meat sentiment will raise it’s broccoli-topped head and brandish carrot swords whilst showing the world a better, healthier more compassionate way. I know it, because health and welfare won the war against cigarettes, so I know it will be victorious here too.

Sure, some people still smoke. It is not gone completely. I expect meat eating to be the same. Neither will be completely eradicated until many, many years hence. But I figure it’s a start – and every little step taken is better for the environment, for us, and for our children.

Only 40 years ago practically every man, woman and child smoked. Today, only 20 per cent of the WORLD smokes. That’s fucking amazing, peeps! And guess what – people are living longer – back in the 50s, life expectancy was 52. Today it’s 72. That’s a 20 year difference and probably much of it is attributed to the non-smoking lifestyle choices and changes we have made. After all, we have fewer smokers and fewer incidences of second-hand smoke diseases. 

Imagine if meat were were mostly eliminated – life expectancy could be 82 or 92 – with less to no cholesterol ingested and very few carcinogens absorbed from processed meats, meat-related diseases would decrease drastically.

I changed my way of thinking about cigarettes way back when, and I quit smoking – as did most of my friends. Today, I also don’t eat meat or dairy – same with many of my friends. I adjusted to the changes both times based on new information and education about the reality of the industries and how they affect us and the world at large (not to mention the animals, in the case of animal agriculture).

If you can quit smoking because of the health benefits and what we now know, you can do the same with meat.

Go vegan!

 

 

 

 

Soapbox Moment

Ok, where’s my soap box? I got something to say.

The TV remote control is a deadly weapon. You want a definition of “weapons of mass destruction”? The clicker, plain and simple.

And not just the TV clicker either: left button on a mouse, toggle switches, channel changers, the “escape” key, ctrl-alt-delete even. Our electronics makes it so easy to avoid seeing and hearing things we don’t like and eliminating unpleasantness from our daily lives. When we don’t want to see or hear something, we can change channels or turn it off, and voila – unpleasantness vanished!

The unpalatable truth is then hidden from view, and we can enjoy our trip to the mall or our dinner out, dodging nasty facts and oblivious to troublesome issues and events. Whew!

Calamities and crises threaten our environment, our people, our animals by our very own act of turning it off – our inaction is in itself an action. Our disinterest is in fact the biggest weapon of mass destruction we have. And it’s dissemination is massive – world wide, in fact.

The clicker, as a weapon of mass destruction, has a sibling, cognitive dissonance. They are different, but the same. Where the clicker allows us to physically shut out what we don’t want to hear, CD allows us to mentally block connections to facts so we remain disconnected from the truth, all done subconsciously. It’s the yin and yang of voluntary ignorance.

The thing is, it’s out there everywhere. We don’t need a presidential “football” or red button to remind us the end of the world is nigh. All we need to do is look at our clicker and the impact of inactivity, of lethargy, of disregard to what is going on under our very noses. This will be enough.

The Amazon is burning – “THE LUNGS OF THE EARTH” peeps, all because farmers want to clear land for raising livestock which will further deplete the world’s natural resources: food, water, land. It will also contribute even more to climate change with carbon emissions. Carbon tax? pfffffff whatever, that won’t do much in the bigger picture – the facts are very clear in any scientific journal: animal agriculture contributes in massive quantities to climate change. The amount of beef harvested is minimal compared to the impact made on our world. There are articles out there, news stories, memes, interviews, photographs, statistics, and scientific reviews but all we do is push that fucking little button on the clicker and take a bite out of our Big Mac.

Cause we don’t want to know that WE ARE TO BLAME; we don’t want to admit responsibility. We don’t want to have to change our lifestyle in any way to accommodate changes and improvements in our world because our comfy little status quo will be uprooted and we might experience a bit of turmoil and heaven forbid we can’t have hamburgers or steak anymore! And all for what? So we don’t experience mass extinction of insects and animals? So we don’t lose air quality? So we can all continue to have potable water? Is it worth it?

Go ahead, push the fucking button on your clicker so you don’t have to put two and two together – show the world how much you really care.

OR – and here’s a thought! – or stay tuned, listen to the horrifying truth, watch the alarming videos, be educated as to the reality of each individuals’ actions (yes, especially your own!) and make a choice. You can choose to contribute to the well-being of the world or you can add your energy to the weapons of mass destruction currently looming on the horizon and gaining power.

I know what I’m choosing.

#govegan

 

 

 

Speaking The Truth

I was going to call this post “Speaking My Truth” but I decided my truth was actually THE truth, There are no perspectives here, despite certain people justifying their actions by using this as an excuse: it was what it was and that’s it.

I decided this year would be the year I would speak out, no longer hide the truth, the facts, notwithstanding how weak I might look to some, or how un-credible I might appear to others. One of my earlier posts introduced the subject and every now and then, I feel compelled to bring it up again. It’s part cleansing myself of the nastiness and part needing to let everyone know the truth of the matter. Because so many people still believe otherwise. I, however, have vowed to no longer be silent on the subject, and so I write this post.

As you know, I’m addicted to memes (yet another addiction!) and I found one today which brought a lot of things up from the deep emotional well in which they are buried. Here it is: 

My personal emotional emancipation began the day I started speaking about my experience as a victim of domestic abuse. At first, I thought it was my opening up about my addiction to alcohol, but that really didn’t start the healing process for me because that was no secret. I wasn’t opening up and coming clean about my drinking, fuck, everyone knew about that! What people didn’t know about, which for years I was deeply ashamed of, and traumatized by, was the abuse I suffered at the hands of my last long-term relationship.

Speaking out about that was epic, peeps. And THAT is what started the healing ball rolling. Speaking out about that was when my life started to begin again. Admitting that I, a strong, independent, intelligent woman could be so browbeaten by someone so emotionally inferior to me was really hard to do, because I should have known better, I should have been able to stop it. One would think, right?

Well all the known facts today state otherwise, of course. But still, inside me I felt so ashamed and stupid I didn’t want anyone to know. But then something magical happened to me. I quit drinking, changed my lifestyle to vegan, started to write again and do my art again, and suddenly there was a part of me that WANTED to tell everyone. I wanted to scream it to the world. I wanted everyone to know he is NOT WHAT YOU THINK! I wanted everyone to beware of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I couldn’t be silent about it anymore.

It became of paramount importance that I tell the world just what I went through, and I was no longer ashamed to admit what happened because I realized I hadn’t actually let it happen to me, HE HAD DONE IT TO ME. There’s a difference.

Now, that being said, there are things I will never tell. Things that I will take to my grave. There is enough material to be made public that those super private things don’t need to be announced. Maybe keeping those secrets will impede my healing, I don’t know. Maybe one day, I will speak of them, but not today. Not tomorrow.

In the meantime, this evil, vile man roams the streets, interacting with people as if NOTHING happened; acting as if he is the victim! His psychotic rants and diatribes aren’t aimed at me anymore, as far as I know, although I’m sure I resurface in there now and then as he extolls on his “perspective” (his perspective is fucked, his mind is like a rubix cube shuffled then stepped on by a rhino. His rants always reflected that). Facebook was his favourite place to vilify me while I was with him, and all his friends would sympathize and click “like” and say things like “there are more fish in the sea, brother”…(so I’m a fish??) and NO ONE knew the reality because I didn’t play those social media games. I didn’t publicly retaliate. I kept quiet and fought the battles privately, behind closed doors.

Him, though, he is so convinced he is right that he puts it out there publicly and challenges people to “show me I’m wrong” (ugh i so remember these posts) and then because no one engages in his insane tirade, he assumes he has once again proven himself most knowledgeable and therefore superior in his rhetoric.

And all his “followers” have no idea of the reality, of the psychosis, of the irrationality. He’d make a good cult leader, actually, now I think about it. Except he doesn’t have the ambition to follow through on anything, he has no sense of commitment or ethics, and prefers to drop projects half way through blaming someone or something else for his failure. A perpetual victim whilst sustaining his appetite to be the victimizer – because believe me, someone was victimized by him during this – client, friend, lover, someone.

That’s why I occasionally drop a post in about this part of my life, about him and what I suffered at his hands. I have to, peeps. It’s always with me. It never goes away. Every single fucking day I think of him or something he did. I try to put it out of my mind, I do. Mostly I’m successful, but it’s always there. His repugnant presence invades my peace of mind daily and nightly. I’ve never hated anyone in my life; but I hate him.

And I don’t think that’s going to change.

And now some well-meaning peeps are going to suggest therapy. This is my therapy, guys. My letting people know about what happened to me, about him, is all the therapy I need. Just knowing maybe one more person knows the truth is the best therapy I could have.

I don’t want to end this on a sad note, because I am not sad, at all. (Depressed, yes, but that’s chronic) I’m on a better path now; I’m realizing things, gaining friends, developing ambitions I never knew I had. It’s just every now and then, I wake up and I think, I have to talk about it again.

Thanks for listening. And be careful around him. He’s dangerous.

 

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