Food For Thought

Take a few moments to look at these photos below. They all have one thing in common- mass containment of animals.

Now take an extra moment with the last in this series of six, bottom right. That’s a prison in El Salvador where people are abused, like the other animals in the structures above. Dense crowding, no hygienic services, death and disease stalk these habitats of confinement. None of these photos are what nature intended, none of them are sustainable, but they all make a profit. This is the industrialized animal system we’re buying into with our earnings. This is the technological advancement of controlling life. I’m just a shepherd, so it’s hard to put what’s going on into words, but this continued action dehumanizes us. We’ve become blind to our actions, dismissing responsibility, and supporting the global militarization and dominion which is the snake eating its own tail, our modern world.

We’ve convinced ourselves, in our very limited understandings, that order and structure are what’s needed to control for the sake of keeping the populace docile and complaisant. Dumbing down so you can build up fanatical loyalty through fear. Be scared of the other, that person/culture/religion you don’t know or understand, because you won’t question or explore, critical thinking went out the window, we’re all watching the show in Plato’s cave. How to get out? A little less news, a little more nature, some outside time, inward reflection, working with gifts, accepting compromise, realizing survival is about cooperation. There is endless possibility here, and some parts more active than others, but just like cycles in nature, there is a time to bloom, and a time to die back, sending the life force back underground to germinate another day.

Lifecycle rule us all, but hubris tells us we can artificially create these cycles and abuse them. I call it abuse when you keep egg laying birds under lights during the winter, when the bird would naturally take a break from producing to take care of its body, in preparation for more laying in the coming season. I call it abuse when we force breed our cows continually to keep them in milk, taking away the babies when they are born, putting them on milk substitutes so we can drink the good stuff ourselves. If the calves are kept alive, it’s only to feed the veal industry. What about keeping a sow in a metal vice while she’s got piglets, forcing her to stay in place all the time so she won’t crush her babies or get free? How about milking horseshoe crabs of their blood? These ancient marine animals have no legal protections, so they are caught in the wild, put in labs and bled, and destroyed when they succumb to the out of water torture.

All this is done to perpetuate our lives as mass consumers. We’ve chosen the path of money, which will take every last living thing for profit. There is no escape from this global prison of wealth abuse, but there are easy ways to distance yourself from it. Buy local, fresh, and stop buying box store stuff. Get rid of online ordering addiction- you really don’t need it, and lived without it long before it came into use. Convenience kills- it’s killing us all with ease. “But I don’t have time…” yes you do, and you did before this stuff came into our world. Reach back into your ancestral lineage to remember what we did before money. Reach back to a time when we crafted things, made do with what we had, and enjoyed the free things in life, like outside time, friends, and community. Community works together to keep everyone healthy and happy. It only works if we buy in- with our time and money. For all the time spent in our cars, on our computer screens, or in our phones, we could be connecting with each other and sharing life experiences, and our gifts. Instead, we’ve been herded like cattle into offices, 9-5 routine, and a paycheck not really worth the efforts, if we could only break free.

This system of life is meant to imprison our minds, and it’s working rather well. Fear is the mind killer, the crippling doubt we all face each day and bow to in our quest for happiness. Does that sound counter intuitive? Well, it is. But we’ve been taught so much scarcity, so much expectation of what success and happiness are. Money can’t feed us, water us, give us the fresh air we need to survive. Sure, we can pay for these things in theory, but the reality is we’re strapped in just like those crabs, being bled out till we die. This is not what people thrive in, and it’s time to make some changes in this world so we can better live with it, rather than on it. Just some food for thought.