On Being Trained Not to Be Active or Concerned

After the Seligman debacle I was thrilled to read Naomi Wolf's Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries (still not done with Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine as it was in Florida and I was in NYC), particularly because I had just overheard a conversation between two young(er) people who were talking about not voting because their vote doesn't matter and both major candidates have been bought by corporations and don't represent their interests.

Wolf quotes Curtis Ellis, "a pirate for liberty" (75), who, when asked what he would say to a 23-year old who plans to stay home on Election Day, says:

"I would want to say–the truth is that he's being used. I would want to say, 'The people in control don't want you to vote. You're a sucker–congratulations'" (86).

She later writes about whether protest is passe and pointless, and whether more can be done on the Internet and her thought is: "That activist citizens have been led to believe this shows how effective the war on liberty has been" (120). And she details the war on liberty, largely from the point of view of someone who wants to run for office or protest by attempting to do those things (or have someone else do them). She experiences the costs, the time, the permits, the insider-rules, and the lack of liberty involved in attempting to exercise liberty and be a good citizen.

Wolf writes of a student who said:

"It's not just that people are being conditioned not to think. It's that they are being conditions not to be concerned. . . . Protest doesn't enter their minds, or citizenship" (129).

I think about people conditioned not to be concerned about animals, and how we have to work hard to get them concerned, but even harder to get them to see animals as in need of justice and freedom rather than mere welfare, which often isn't even welfare at all.

A bit later, when referring to her students, in general, she writes:

[They] have not been taught that all that we cherish or even simply take for granted . . . all came about because of some handful of crazy idealists who simply did not accept that they were powerless to spark great change, who gathered in spite of opprobrium, every kind of ridicule, and every reason to believe that their vision of the future was a pointless, even suicidal, dream" (132).

And I found this a particularly useful point that could be applied to vegan education:

The Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, took decades of movement activity to push the nation to a crisis point. The Nineteenth Amendment, which extended the vote to American women, was also first a sixty-year state-by-state battle. Both of these amendments passed when society had shifted to the point at which it was psychologically untenable for a plurality or majority of Americans to resist the concepts that drove the law" (137).

We must make it psychologically untenable for people to continue to view animals as resources for our entertainment, consumption (literally), and management. Yesterday I was interviewed by a journalist with The Christian Science Monitor regarding alligator hunts in South Carolina (1,000 new permits have been issued), and what I hope I got across more than anything, wasn't how cruel or unsportsmanlike hunting is, but the premise that the alligators aren't ours to manage.

In addition, the fact that most alligator "attacks" occur due to the ignorance of people, not the viciousness of alligators, and then we punish the gators for our ignorance, is injustice at its peak. But it's also laziness (and greed for the permit money). If our children were required to have humane education (not to mention financial literacy–another area I'm passionate about), human-alligator interactions would decrease, and there would be less of the hysteria which fuels the calls to "destroy" them. And if children were taught that alligators are as sentient as their Golden Retrievers, and were taught that creatures who look very different and not cuddly aren't bad, we could dramatically change the dynamic between alligators and humans. But I digress . . .

Back to Wolf. Regarding The Declaration of Independence:

[It says] something darker and more personally demanding [than most of us were taught]: you have a sacred obligation to take the most serious possible steps and undergo the most serious kinds of personal risks in defense of this freedom that is your natural right; and you must rise up against those who seek to subdue you–wherever and whenever they appear" (18-19).

Stay tuned tomorrow for some thoughts on the second half of the Give Me Liberty.