Copy of a post I wrote on Facebook the other day:
Alright, I've been vegan one month now and here's the deal. We have heard now over and over that our climate is changing and yet we feel powerless to do anything about it. Conserve, vote, encourage renewable energy, use less plastic. Well it's not working. About a year ago (and very late) I heard on NPR the #1 thing I could do to help the planet, besides not having children, would be to cut meat out of my diet. So I started inching in that direction. Yet I was taking half measures. Excuses here and there. No meat, but maybe fish? Eggs and dairy and cheese? No problem, what's the harm in that? Now I know - Extreme harm. Blood-soaked, monstrous, fucking Nazi-like harm.
At UNC they are endlessly debating Silent Sam and one of the arguments in favor of the clear monument to white supremacy and Confederate reverence is that Julian Carr, who at its dedication, proudly stated he whipped a black woman until her skirt hung in shreds, was part of his culture at the time. Are we supposed to judge people based on the morality of the future? Fuck yes we are. I don't look kindly on those who took part or turned a blind eye to slavery or Nazis just because that's what was done at the time, just because it was normal or cultural or something we thought we couldn't do anything about. This is the same thing. No excuses. I urge anyone to go to YouTube and type in "Dominion" and tell me what's different about that and slavery and the Holocaust besides our own sense of superiority that because it was humans it was somehow different. It's brutal footage that everyone should see, and if it doesn't move you to action I don't know what will.
This change takes determination and willingness to grow. It took me the loss of my job and a relationship and a final nudge towards some of the gruesome footage (from a different film) to push me over the edge to decide it's time to change and go fully vegan. Since then, I dove in to the films and literature and the more I have learned the more horrifying what we've been doing has been made clear to me. We are simply out of time and out of excuses. The moral justification for consumption of any animal products is bankrupt, and all we do is make excuses for ourselves. We are simply destroying ourselves and our planet in monstrous ways, and we aren't aware, and want to hide, from just how monstrous we are.
So many of us are trying to do what's right. I see my friends here post about Trump, about minority rights, gay rights, trans rights, women's rights, human rights, immigrant rights, even environmental and animal rights. We are trying to do the right thing any way we know how. Well here's something we can do in our everyday lives with every purchase and every meal - we can actually do something meaningful. This is one of those things we have to do. The reasons to are just too numerous. Our diets are not sustainable and are destroying the planet. They're destroying our bodies. They're contributing to horrific suffering on a staggering scale. And the good news is we can stop. And we finally have a solution to myriad problems all at once. I've never felt more empowered or optimistic that we are on the verge of fixing a lot that's wrong in this world.