I repeat what I mentioned in my first entry that I was not shocked by the footage. Is what we saw really so different than things we already see and know? I would like to share with you an example that so ironically ties together racism and speciesism and brings these issues home to Austin. A place called White Egret Farms off of Webberville Road has been employing immigrants to feed, process, and kill chickens and turkeys. Mind you, this is not a slaughterhouse, but it is safe to assume that these turkeys and chickens are not experiencing pain-free deaths. They are still being bred only to be slaughtered for food. While the farm’s mission statement appears to be progressive, there is absolutely no mention of a humane killing (if there is such a thing) of the animals. The issue is absolutely absent from their website or from the accounts I hear from workers. The owner of the company, Lee Dexter, has 13 warrants for her arrest, many of which are because she has simply neglected to pay certain workers. Either she just forgot on nearly six occasions to pay her Latino immigrant workers or she is enacting racist and discriminatory employment practices. The irony is that the people slitting throats and bleeding animals to death are immigrants who are treated as sub-human and “alien.” The turkeys that lo-wage workers are contracted to kill for not even the minimum wage will be sitting on our dining tables for Thanksgiving in a few short weeks. I think watching the film for me was more exhausting than it was shocking. I wish I had experienced outrage or surprise, because I would feel much more inclined to fight against the meat-packaging industry and systems of animal cruelty the world over. But the truth is that we don’t even treat our fellow human brethren as equals, so how can we even begin to change our perception of animals as equals until we address our own prejudices against humans?
I reacted to this violent reality in a similar way that UT Journalism Professor and activist, Robert Jensen, responded to the tragedy of 9/11. He wrote: “Malcolm X was correct, and it was appropriate for Ward Churchill to quote him: Chickens do, indeed, come home to roost. And whether U.S. citizens want to acknowledge it or not, there likely will be chickens heading our way for years to come.” Puns about animals aside, Earthlings leaves us thinking that we are somehow victims of a system that pulls the wool over our eyes, that hides the reality of genocide, of violence, of slaughter. The narrator of Earthlings says that “Surely, if slaughterhouses had glass walls, would not all of us be vegetarians?” At the risk of intellectualizing something that has indeed emotionally affected me, I must respectfully disagree with this statement. We create these walls, barriers, and borders. Why are we surprised about the reality of the meat-packaging industry? What did we think was in our too-perfectly-circular hamburger patties or hot dogs? Who are the culprits here if not the people who want to tailgate with BBQ, eat bratwurst to celebrate German culture, or cannot envision a breakfast without eggs and bacon—the consumers and the culture of consumerism? We are. And as participants in this industry of animal cruelty, we have the power to destroy it or at least question it.
After 9/11, people were outraged, grief-stricken, and ready to act—not unlike us students after seeing Earthlings. Jensen goes on in support of Churchill’s critique of the collective shock that gripped the American people post-9/11, saying: “we citizens of the U.S. empire bear some collective responsibility for those crimes, depending on our level of power and privilege, and our capacity for resistance.” As perhaps the most privileged students on the UT campus, we have the power and the obligation to challenge impunity regarding the animal cruelty and injustices everywhere. Whether we are talking about crimes against humanity as in Churchill’s argument, or crimes against animals in Earthlings, the implication rings blaringly clear: we have helped fuel, fund, and feed this global phenomenon of animal cruelty and speciesism just as much as we are complicit in the perpetuation of racism.
Speaking of racism, I wanted to share a quote that resonated with me--perhaps because for the first time, it faulted the human race:
"man in civilization surveys
the creatures through the glass of his knowledge and sees
thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in
distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness,
for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below
ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err."
Whether it’s the pig who is herded into a slaughterhouse or (what is likely) the migrant worker who loses his life in a slaughterhouse machine accident, there is no question that cruelty exists on many levels on the species continuum. (On a sidenote, Microsoft Word has repeatedly corrected me when I treat the word “pig” as a person, as in the underlined example. Even in our language we objectify animals. This echoes what the narrator of Earthlings says: “However, it is the human earthling who tends to dominate the earth, often times treating other fellow earthlings and living beings as mere objects.”) We have objectified everything so that we can rationalize the suffering we are causing. We as a human race are bloodied beyond words. Even if we could strip away all of our defenses and walls and psychological detours, we would likely die from the overwhelming sense of feeling, of grief. Realizing just how deep the rabbit hole goes and how entrenched these systems of oppression are, would render us catatonic in an instant. We would no longer make cinematic entertainment a projection of our violent tendencies. We would cry, we would hurt, and we would feel.
To me, it looks like we don’t want to be connected. All the boundaries that exist in society—all of our borders, ethnic groupings, racialized identities, species, histories—are socially constructed. We like to separate, to divide, to rationalize, to categorize, and to compartmentalize. This distracts us from the idea that our individual actions really do affect everyone to varying degrees. Humanity resentfully schlepps behind it this dead weight; and now, it is taking its toll. “The chickens are coming home to roost.” We have become less creative human beings and so caught up in the full-time job of navigating the many labels and boxes of society, that we fail to see the matrix that we have built to imprison our minds. We have bloodied our collective human conscience and resort to hiding behind impenetrable cement walls that we build around our nations (think U.S.-Mexico Border Wall), our homes (think privacy fences), and our hearts (think psychological defense mechanisms). I offer no remedy for this condition of self-imposed ignorance and denial. I have lost patience with the dire state of this world. I used to think people were crazy for seeming so urgent about the problems in the world. Now I know they were sane and we were the crazy ones.
On another note, just after watching Earthings, I met a talented beatboxer/ voicetrumentalist with whom I chatted about the sociology of fractals (of which I know very little). Having studied fractals for years, he argued that human beings (and earthlings in general) are really no different from fractals in that each individual is simply a “reduced-size copy of the whole, a property called self-similarity.” (I just referenced Wikipedia for a definition of a fractal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal.) One small part of the fractal changes, therefore, and the entire “whole” of the fractal also changes. Following this theory, it seems we are more connected than we think. The implication is that each individual can change the “self-similar” collective simply by making a shift in their individual lives. Perhaps. I don’t know that I believe his theory at this point in my life; but I think it is something worth pondering in the quiet moments in which we feel defeated. I myself have felt utterly defeated and pessimistic about the state of the world, but as long as I am still in it, borrowing words from Gloucester in King Lear, I propose that we “see the world feelingly”--and mindfully.
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