Pushing the wave (Chicago VeganMania)...

Back when I started with this business of being vegan, back in the Mesozoic era of the mid-1990s when terrifying winged beasts beat their wings in circles above us and all the milk in local coffee shops came from udders, life ticked along at a distinctly different syncopation. In Chicago, there were usually between twenty and thirty of us who were consistently active, and we met monthly in church basements or spare rooms at the library. Photos from the time were, to put it bluntly, strange: fervent activists in their twenties working side-by-side with sad-eyed animal lovers in their sixties, with few ages represented in between. Back in the day, we got loopy from marker vapors together when we made our protest signs, we looked through an endless stack of boxes in a volunteer's basement to find the musty old chicken costume and played rock-paper-scissors to determine who would almost faint while wearing it at the World Vegetarian Day leafletting, we licked envelopes, people, and lugged all the newsletters to the post office downtown four times a year. We passed our favorite catalogue around the table at Mandy's house and put in group orders together for t-shirts, buttons, stickers. I still have one of those shirts, worn in and cozy like a favorite baby blanket, a black ink Rorsharch splotch on a sleeve from one of our marathon sign-making sessions. It's in the drawer of t-shirts designated only as sleep wear these days. It just has words on it: No, I don't eat meat. Yes, I get enough protein. No, my shoes aren't leather. Yes, I have a life. This shirt encapsulated the experience of a vegan animal advocate, and that particular time in my life, perfectly. Every time I pull it out, it's like I'm transformed back to the day, and I'm standing outside of a circus again or I'm in front of the McDonald's in River North, standing with my friends, rolling our eyes at the dirty looks, making our far superior snide comments about the idiotic snide comments. It's a t-shirt, and a time, that always makes me smile in recollection. 

Although I am nostalgic for the sienna-toned quaintness of that time, for the passionate connection that face-to-face hands-on work creates, I am very grateful to be able to enjoy this particular time right now perhaps because i remember what it was like before veganism had gained a little foothold in our popular culture. We are still very small in actual numbers, but somehow, we've become a force to be reckoned with over the past decade, and the ripple effect of our influence is keenly felt. Recently, for example, I went with my son to an apple festival in the city. Back when I lived in that very same neighborhood of Lincoln Square, it was all about the German delis. (At the Brauhaus on a date, I asked the server if they had anything vegetarian and she recommended hasenpfeffer, rabbit stew, but thankfully I had seen the Bugs Bunny cartoon where the king angrily - and with imperious sibilance -  demanded it so I was nobody's fool. Who says cartoons have no value?) In other words, Lincoln Square was pretty much the opposite of a vegan mecca. Today, the German food and culture remains, but shuffled between everything is more than a little hint at the change that's happening. At the apple festival, I could walk into pretty much any café with a boy Who Suddenly Could Not Wait Even A Second Longer to use the restroom, and know that I could pick up something in the treats-for-bathroom barter system. Later, when we picked up soy- and fruit-based gelato it occurred to me once again, as my friend told to the guy behind the counter that they should carry more soy options, what a radically different culture my son is growing up in, thank goodness. Back in the 1990s, my friends and I would launch into spontaneous cartwheels and shout from the rooftops if one coffee shop offered a dry, tasteless vegan cookie or we spotted the v-word on a menu, elusive and magical like a purple unicorn, but today, my son and his little herbivorous urban peers take it for granted that there will be high quality vegan treats for them. Not only that, but they actually have a choice now because just chocolate or vanilla is soooo pre-school: pumpkin, cinnamon swirl, lemon poppyseed, blueberry-freaking-cream cheese. Yes, they're a generation of entitled little brats who will never have to walk three miles barefoot in the snow for mushy veggie burgers, but I can't describe the sense of happiness I feel when I go somewhere and we can just be like everyone else. (But cooler!)

A couple of things to make clear: a culturally diverse, large city, and all the bounty within, is in easy access. I understand that this effortlessness is not available everywhere and I am so appreciative of what we have here. Second, I don't mistake a proliferation of vegan cupcakes as evidence that the revolution is at hand. The revolution will not be found in a bag of powdered sugar. The shift is happening, though, and it is seismic and it is real, born of natural cultural change, smart outreach, talented animal advocates and people waking up to the inescapable reality that our dietary habits cannot continue if we are to continue. It has not translated into fewer animals being consumed or abused yet - these institutions are nothing if not entrenched - but I have no doubt that this will happen as the wave continues. What we are witnessing is this slow untangling in real time so we may not always see it in an obvious way, but make no mistake that it is happening. Imagine the evolution of the vegan lifestyle as it settles into our larger culture like stop-action photography, from 1995 until the present. The dust is still very much unsettled and I believe that the boomerang we tossed out is really in its infancy of its journey back, but progress is certainly happening. I have no doubt about that.

This all a very longwinded way to explain what I am up to these days. My husband and I, along with some of the very best kind of people you could know, are putting together an event called Chicago VeganMania, and it's happening October 9 at the Pulaski Park Fieldhouse, 1419 W. Blackhawk in Chicago from 10:00 - 6:00. This is our second year. The driving force behind our event, the thing that gets us excited to send out press releases and answer questions about parking (okay, this last thing is an exaggeration) in addition to all the other work we're doing, is the idea of third and fourth wave activism. If you think back on the historic arc of social justice movements, which the animal advocacy movement is part of, you'll see that the first wave is usually confrontation. It's people not getting to the back of the bus, it is Stonewall. This is what propels us at the beginning, what gives us momentum and the passion. Education is next: this is the outreach, the written materials that make the case, the more recognizable advocacy work. Understandably, the vegan movement has largely centered around these first two waves of activism. What we are trying to do with Chicago VeganMania is to be a part of ushering in the next two waves: celebration, which is the sort of thing witnessed in cultural pride festivals, and integration, where the "whys" of veganism rarely come into play, and it is simply accepted as a normal and natural way of life. The first two waves are still vitally important and they work in tandem with what follows: it's not as though they dissolve when the next waves begin. It is an organic and fluid back-and-forth motion, as waves naturally will be, with different current systems throughout. We need the third and fourth waves, though, for the veganism to take root on a mass scale and become more than a fringe movement. This doesn't mean that we're adapting veganism for mainstream tastes: quite the opposite. By taking proud ownership and putting it out there in our unique and diverse ways with our unique and diverse gifts, we are ensuring that that this movement that flows outward whether we like it or not, will have our particular stamp on it. And our stamp is fabulous so Chicago VeganMania will be fabulous!

We will have speakers, all lovely and passionate and talented with their distinctive voices. There's Nathan Runkle, Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, Isa Chandra Moskowitz, Dr. Milton Mills, Dr. Michael Greger, and Zarakyah Ben Sar Ahmadiel. We will also have cooking demos this year, with Isa Chandra Moskowitz again, Kim Gracen (from The Chicago Diner), Fran Costigan, Kelly Peloza, Linda Szarkowski and chefs from Soul Vegetarian. We will have entertainment: The Giving Tree Band, The Exponential, Read My Hips (belly dance troupe), The Rust Belt Ramblers, Phenom and Nikki Lynette. (The schedule and bios can here found here.)

There will be so much else: a children's play area. A DJ'd Luxury Lounge where people can relax and connect, Dozens of cruelty-free, independent vendors. Great food. Gift bags for the first one hundred in line age sixteen and older. A vegan rock star photo booth. Even a Vegan Cupcake Fairy! It's going to be amazing and it's all going to be part of that vibrant collective creative vision that is a small part of what is ushering in the third and fourth waves of the vegan movement.

So get excited and come to see us if you can at Chicago VeganMania. If you can't join us, keep adding your distinctive talents and unique, compassionate voice to the mix. When people perceive veganism as something more than a dietary fad, as something different than an exclusive club you need to know the secret handshake to gain entry to, we will effect incredible change. Chicago VeganMania is part of the galvanizing entrenchment of the movement. We have so much at our fingertips, we really do. Keep your eyes on the prize, and keep moving forward!

See you there...

Lady Gaga's Meat Dress Statement, zzzzz....

I'd heard rumbles about the Japanese Vogue with Lady Gag (that last 'a' in her name suddenly and inexplicably stopped working) in a meat bikini and, as I do so often with pop and mainstream culture in our society, I studiously avoided seeing it. The insatiable drilling away on our inner-peace by the media, though, made it virtually impossible for me to completely avoid that magazine cover, but the moment that my eyes caught a glimpse, they ran and hid. I prefer to stay under the radar here in my happy little vegan world: yes, I know fully well that people "out there" eat meat and take their kids to circuses and some even experiment on animals in laboratory cages, but in Vegan Land, where bunnies nibble organic carrots and every baby mammal drinks his own mother's milk without harassment, I'm in a much happier place. I spent quite a few years as someone who was deeply disappointed and angry about innumerable aspects of how our society functions: the violence, injustice, the stupefying normalization of cruelty, just everyday events. As a result of looking at things in this way, unsurprisingly, I only saw violence, injustice and cruelty. My lenses became skewed, unable to see the breathtaking beauty of this place, and I became depressed, imbalanced. It is much better for all parties if I just tune out occasionally. That little bit of air in an otherwise suffocating space allows me to catch my breath before I sink back into it. It helps me not to drown. So the Japanese Vogue came and went, and it made just the barest of ripples on my psyche.

As an activist, I also have a strategic quandary with the meat bikini: what is wrong about wearing meat when people eat animals and wear leather? Doesn't it at least force consumers to face what they try avoid from seeing? Yes and no. On the one hand, it is hard to be in an uproar about something when you support this practice in a less overt, but no less cruel, way. In terms of damage done, there is little difference between eating steak and making an attempt at an avant-garde statement of some sort by wearing an outfit made of it. As a former painting major who even took a performance art class (don't hold it against me: it was fun) what needles me at a deeper level is the notion that someone like Lady Gag can wear such an ensemble, package it as A Provocative Artistic Statement, and then call it a day. With artists, or people who adopt the cultural embellishments we associate with artists, we're supposed to take their word on such matters.

More recently, Gag wore a dress, hat and shoes fashioned out of cuts of meat to MTV's Video Music Awards. The next day, when asked by the popular vegan talk show host Ellen DeGeneres about her outfit, Gag said, "As you know, I am the most judgment-free human being on the earth. [It] has many interpretations, but for me this evening, if we don't stand up for what we believe in, if we don't fight for our rights, pretty soon we'll have as much rights as the meat on our bones." Then she held up a copy of her issue of Japanese Vogue and said with a smile and mock stridency, "And I am not a piece of meat."

Oh really? That's your statement, Gag? That you are not a piece of meat so you are wrapping yourself in it to...to...I nodded off there, sorry, let me open the window, get some fresh air...you are wearing meat to show that you are NOT meat. Right? Right? And this wrapping of yourself in misery and violence and exploitation is a way to show the powers that be that they must not try to suppress Lady Gag's voice, right? That she is not a piece of meat, even though she has associated herself with it without apparently irony. And the animals that became those pieces of meat? Their lives, the horrors they were born into, breathed, saw, suffered under and ultimately fell to, existed to become mere props for a derivative pop singer reformulated as a performance artist. The rest of the animals, the billions that were not to be part of Gag's wardrobe? Those that are neither Art nor Statement? They remain just pieces of meat.

In the end, this woman who presents herself as an iconoclast and an artist is just like anyone else in line at the drive-thru, consuming animals for her reasons, basking in a set of privileges she is not challenging. A blasé sense of elite entitlement is every bit as ordinary and unoriginal and stupefyingly normal as someone in line trying to decide between a cheeseburger and a Big Mac.

You don't have us fooled, Lady Gag. You're just reinforcing the cultural privileges, norms and power structures. In other words, you're just like nearly every other schmuck.

And with that, I'm skipping off back to Vegan Land. La dee da! See you guys there.

There is no Y.O.U. in Unity

When I was a child, my family had a bit of a PR problem. We looked more or less like our neighbors, our yard was tidy but sprinkled with colorful, heavy-headed flowers, my brother and I were dressed, fed and taken for our yearly doctor appointments. It was just that under the surface, things were a kind of roiling mess, sort of like a house that looks orderly, but you can't move the couch an inch or open the closet or everything will come spilling out. Despite most outward appearances that reinforced our status as upstanding suburban citizens, we had a pretty big problem. The problem tended to get drunk and disorderly. It was a blessing when the problem would finally pass out for the night but getting there was a dicey, rocky ride full of peril. Other times, the problem would race with the whole family in the car and swerve towards parked cars, big trees in medians, and as his captive passengers, we would clench on door handles, too scared to look or even make a sound. My mother would turn and look at us, shrug and shake her head like, "Oh, this again. He's crazy."

We learned to carry on as normal. At a young age, my brother and I began to steer clear of the problem and we scheduled our Sunday's full of activities as that was the day the problem would be in the living room, the kitchen, the back yard. My mother, given her limited tools and life experiences, tried her best. One of her coping strategies was that we were told, quite plainly, that we were not to admit to the problem. The elephant was in the room, he was all over the damn house, he was trumpeting and stomping and spraying water over everything, but we were not allowed to acknowledge the mere existence of the elephant. Family unity, at least the impression of it, trumped anything else and speaking of anything that contradicted the appearance of us as anything but a happy, healthy, wholesome family was tantamount to treason. Worse, it spoke to our selfishness if we couldn't just "get over it" for the good of maintaining family peace and a decent public image. Being asked to be complicit in a lie, and the implication that if you refuse, you are selfish, shallow and harming others, is a deeply troubling accommodation to ask of another and it wreaks havoc on one's emotional health. The deception is multifaceted: not only are we told that we don't see what we knew we see, but we are told that we don't feel what we know we feel. We are also told that we are responsible for harm to others if we don't maintain the lie.

Al these years later, I still have a immediate, visceral reaction when I am told to suppress my thoughts and feelings for "the good for the whole." It is anathema to me and it sends me reeling back to that awful time in my life when I was not only powerless but pressured to maintain a flagrant lie. It saddens me to admit that there is an undercurrent of this attitude in the vegan movement, of pressure to shut your mouth if you disagree with tactics and to give your tacit approval by remaining silent. Some within the movement hold those of us who don't walk in lockstep responsible for the horrendous treatment of billions of animals, and we are told in no uncertain terms that our disagreements are banal, they are stupid, and that we are wrong to have them. Just like the message in my home growing up, we are told this implicitly and explicitly, and we are told that if we don't stop being selfish and petty about our silly little issues, others will be harmed. In fact, we are responsible for it. I believe that this is an emotionally manipulative and abusive paradigm, whether people mean for it to be or not.

Feminists in the animal advocacy movement are consistently told to just shut up about our ridiculous insistence that objectification is objectification, whether women are turned into "pieces of meat" to promote a PETA advertising campaign or cows are turned into "pieces of meat" to support a McDonald's advertising campaign. When living, unique beings can be objectified - reduced to an object (Boobies! Hamburgers!) or a means (titillation) to an end (hunger satiety) - any horrible abuse imaginable is possible. We need to speak up when we see examples that some forms of exploitation are condemned and others are embraced. I know that the confusion here is that women actually participate in these campaigns on their own free will and PETA certainly manipulates this to their favor, creating blurriness around the idea of choice. Regardless of who "chooses," these objectifying campaigns are still reinforcing the notion that women are passive, two-dimensional props to be used toward some nebulous goal. It is still reinforcing the same sort of disconnected mentality and privileged perspective that supports and creates obfuscation around what we do to so-called food animals. Whether or not you agree with me, the idea of telling someone to shut up and get in line, telling someone that she is a selfish, silly little girl for responding when she sees objectification, is deeply disturbing. We can disagree, but no one should be told to shut up and get in line. Ever. Speaking as someone who had this tactic forced on her as a child and attempted on her as an adult, I will tell you that it is abusive and fascistic.

People may claim that disagreements within the movement creates disharmony and is a waste of our resources: we should be unified, we are so small in number anyway, we don't need to fragmentize further. I don't "harmonize" with misogyny, though, just as I don't with other forms of exploitation. I tend to think of this as a good thing. Those of us who speak out are often told that we hurt the movement. You know what really hurts the movement? When people use shaming, idiotic and mean-spirited tactics and the rest of us remain mute, bullied into silence, taking it on faith that there's some amorphous benefit in maintaining the illusion of unity. What helps the movement? A diversity of views and voices and talents and people. Creative, truly progressive, smart advocacy. Not letting sick, disturbed people control the dialogue through manipulation and bullying, instead adding our unique gifts and provocative thoughts to the soup pot. Don't ever shut up and get in line. Your honest, brave, liberated spirit is what the movement - and the animals - needs more than ever.

I've been missing you and this and I'm glad to be back. Smooches....

Break...

Do you ever have a dream where you find an extra room in your house that you'd never discovered before? That's the only sort of recurring dream I think I have: I am walking around my house - or the house in my dream - and I discover an indoor swimming pool. Imagine the delight! Somebody had been maintaining it all those years, too. It would be equally amazing if if I discovered a secret stash of time that no one else knew about.

If I found a stingy genie who would only grant me one wish for my personal life, it would be for every day of my life to last for 48-hours. There is just too much to do this summer between various freelance jobs, regular writing assignments, taking care of my mother and son, Chicago VeganMania and trying to make sure that my house and yard don't become complete embarrassments. Every day is simply buckling under the weight of what is on my plate. There is also the small matter of a manuscript that I dearly love that desperately needs my attention. I need to give any spare time to this. So I am making the executive decision to take a little break here. It was causing me so much guilt and unhappiness that I was not updating but I simply don't have the time. I will resume when my son goes back to school at the end August. Maybe I'll be back sooner, though, if I can discover that extra 24-hours.

Smooches to all! Enjoy your summer and I will talk to you soon!

Camp!

Now that my son is out of school for the summer, my mind naturally turns to one thing: camp. When I think of camp, it is a swirling sensory experience: it smells like bug spray, mildew-y bathrooms and plastic bottles of hyper-sweet juice drink. It looks like daddy longlegs and idolized teenaged counselors wearing terry cloth sweatbands. It sounds like garbled, buzzing announcements over the loudspeakers, singing the disturbingly violent Little Bunny FooFoo complete with hand gestures en mass, mosquitoes everywhere. It tastes like airy vanilla-fudge swirl ice milk in the little plastic cartons with the tabs that lifted up, crispy-skinned toasted marshmallows with gooey insides. It feels like pointy plants brushing against your leg that may or may not be poison ivy, terry cloth (the fabric of my youth), Band-Aids on my elbows and knees.

When I was growing up, like many North Americans, I experienced both day camp and overnight camp. Both were pretty much Machiavellian affairs, especially as soon as the thrill of weaving misshapen pot-holders and Ojo de Dios with sticks and yarn wore off and we grew bored, then started setting our sights on each other. There was always someone who would hyperventilate at the sight of any sort of winged creature, someone who would glumly hand the counselor a note from her mother that she was not allowed to swim until a full hour after lunch, someone who melted into a heap of human heat-stroke as soon as she stepped off the bus, someone who permanently had zinc oxide affixed to her nose. There were top tier campers, too, of course, the ones who bronzed rather than burned, who would optimistically spring from the tire swings over the lake with the gangly athletic grace they took as a birthright while the rest of us only knew painful belly flops. The mass of the us were sandwiched between these bookends, relatively content for the most part. Within the micro-climate that was camp, though, things could turn on a dime and an unfortunate camper who sat in the wrong "permanently saved" bus seat or who was identified as the source of the "weird smell" could find herself sitting at the picnic table with the bug-phobic, overprotected, heat-addled outer edge. That was an omnipresent threat in the Lord of the Flies environment that was summer camp. Anything goes and anything went.

Despite this, I look back with fondness, perhaps born more of nostalgia than of genuinely good feelings. At the first camp I went to, I was on the Yellow Triangle bus that picked me up on the end of Romona Road. The bus driver looked like a migraine in human form, her patience already ripped to shreds at 8:30 in the morning by thirty or so squealing, singing campers. Every day after camp, we elbowed and jostled one another to find that correct color and shape combination lest we be whisked off to the hinterlands and a bus lot where we'd almost certainly starve to death overnight. There was also the seat wrangling: who sat with whom, who got the window seat, who had to sit in the back of the bus with the seat with the rusty coil poking up. Camp was a lot to negotiate with just the politics around the bus ride. The Yellow Triangle bus was a little universe unto itself where I learned about negotiation, alliances, hierarchies. It is not surprising that as camp is part of the American experience, so, too, is reality television. One important life lesson that day camp helped to instill in me: if you don't like what you see around you, create a new reality altogether. Plugging into something else is always an option. I sat wherever I wanted.

If the bus was a human behavioral petrie dish on wheels, the actual campgrounds were the laboratory where it all played out. That first day of camp, the impossibly huge mass of us was divvied up among roaming counselors with clipboards. We wanted the pretty one, the athletic one with the pom-pom socks, the one who seemed the most like our fantasy babysitter. We crossed our collective fingers that the one with the thick glasses, flushed cheeks and Ace bandage around her knee would not call our names because then it was over: all her charges were dweebs by association. The truth was that even if you were assigned to the pretty, cool counselor, you were still subject to the vagaries of intense social maneuvering. I was content to fly under the radar with my ragtag mix of Wilmette school district friends: smily Laura with the corkscrew curls, Fee with the goofy-serious mien, skinny Annie, always ready to belt out a show tune whether the timing was appropriate or not. My friends made camp bearable and even fun, which leads to another important life lesson I took away from camp: I never did make a really great pot holder, but I did learn that quality wins over quantity every time.

At day camp, we had treacherous relay races against other groups, we played catch the flag, we wore broken safety vests while canoeing in the lake, we checked each other for ticks with nervous hearts, and we took occasional field trips to fetid, unpleasant and crowded places that escape my memory except for those few details. Lunch was brown-bagged, soggy and with stink lines emanating. Still, the Yellow Triangle bus returned me home at 3:00 or so and I was no worse for the wear. The next day I was fresh and recharged, waiting with my mom at the end of the block for the Yellow Triangle bus with the poor, migraine-y driver again.

Overnight camp was a more challenging, complicated affair as it coincided with junior high and the terrain that came with it. I went to two overnight camps. The first one was called Camp Watervliet, and it featured horseback riding in a verdant Michigan setting. We didn't realize that we'd be woken by a very energetic, bugle-toting counselor playing a mean-spirited Reveille right outside our musty cabins at six in the morning. We groaned like the teenagers we were transitioning into and thumped out of our bunk beds, heads in our hands to brush and saddle the horses. Bleary-eyed at dawn, I never did learn how to properly saddle a horse. The first week or two, those of us from the North Shore of Chicago wrote heart-wrenching letters to our mothers like we were saucer-eyed Amnesty International poster children: do have any idea what they do to us here?!

Once the shock of the rude awakening wore off a bit, Camp Watervliet settled into a nice place to be. There were horses to ride, guitars to strum, arrows to aim at an archery board affixed to a tree. We had a canteen set up twice a week that our parents dutifully sent us money to strip bare, full of the Hostess and Lay products we were suffering shaking withdrawal from since we left home. There was an annual play that we performed for a neighboring camp: the first year, it was The Hobbit, and we had to audition and everything. I was shocked when I was originally cast as Bilbo Baggins but I gave up the role to a blonde alpha girl named from Florida who reeeeally wanted the role. I took on the part of Gollum instead, a much juicier role actually, and I properly chewed up the scenery with my interpretation of his uniquely tortured psyche. After two summers there, I jumped ship to Camp Chi, a Jewish overnight camp in Wisconsin, and my days at the relative simplicity of of Camp Watervliet took on a halcyon glow: Camp Chi was a hard-core, raging pheromone seventh grade torture camp set in the woods. We didn't need a homicidal psychopath like Jason: we had other campers.

For one thing, for the first time in my life, I was now going to a co-ed camp. While just the year before at Camp Watervliet some girls brought stuffed animals and cried from homesickness, the girls here were wearing lip gloss and mascara, big combs in their back pockets, Ralph Lauren polo shirts tucked into their shorts. For another thing, there was a small but dedicated army of mean girls from a different school district who made it their business to torment who wasn't from theirs and I only had one other friend there so my alliance was pretty puny. To compound everything, this was the summer my body decided to start menstruating, perhaps spurred on by the close quarters in my cabin. So I had to buy "time of the month products" at the canteen, which meant that the goings-on with my uterus was soon public knowledge even though I carried my products back to the cabin in a brown paper bag like I had just bought a Hustler or something. The mean girls had spies everywhere, of course. They probably had the staple of daddy longlegs working for them.

These same girls tormented their European counselor so viciously that she flew back to Norway after a week. They were grounded for any number of infractions, so after they drew all over their cabin with markers, they went wilding: rampaging through the kitchen, letting the horses loose, running like tortured POW escapees into town when they were the ones who's been actually holding the camp hostage. Sadly, they weren't all sent home. Sadly, their parents were even called. The camp management collectively shrugged their shoulders and some guy with a Jewfro who perpetually wore tennis shorts made an executive decision to give them more freedom. Their reign of terror continued: we would continue to wake every morning to find they'd tossed our training bras up a tree and scrawled threats and insults on our cabin door in black Magic Marker. God, they were evil. Imagine the worst of junior high without disciplinary measures, grades or even the ability to go home at the end of the day. That was Camp Chi in a nutshell. Oh, and throw some mosquitoes and bloodthirsty ticks into the mix. Needless to say, I ran off the bus when we finally returned home and if memory serves, I actually kissed the parking lot pavement. I don't think I was ever so happy to see my family.

So it is with all this baggage in mind that I still decided to send my son to day camp for four hours twice a week. It's managed by clean-scrubbed young college students and it all seems pretty innocuous so far. It looks to be causing a minimum of psychological damage. At the very least, well, I know he'll survive. I did.

Blah blah blah...

It's summer, so my son is home from school and under my care but for four hours twice a week. My mother is living with us now, too. I've got deadlines breathing down my neck. I will be back soon. Just not quite yet. In the meantime, if anyone has a line on a cloning machine, I'd love to hear about it. Thanks and hugs to you lovely people.

Exploitation + Objectification = Conklin Farms. (In other words, business as usual.)

I love Mercy For Animals. They are tirelessly committed advocates who create a staggering amount of impressive output every year. They don't resort to shock tactics or insults to get their message across and they present dignified, forward-thinking and honest communications to the public. In this world where PeTA and their human circus of yodeling naked ladies have come to represent vegans, I am deeply grateful for MFA and their consistently thoughtful approach.

This is not a critique of them or their very brave work. I think that if people would truly listen, the only honest conclusion to draw from their work is that those who care about animals should stop eating them. Of course, people will interpret MFA's investigations how they want, though.

Interpretation is everything. This is something that I've become keenly aware of in the aftermath of various exposés that bring the horrors of industrial farming to the public, and it was really brought home by the now-notorious Conklin Farms undercover investigation. I should say that I have not watched the footage and I very much doubt that I will ever be able to do so. (My optimism is tenuous sometimes and I need to safeguard it the best I can.) What I noticed was, counter-intuitively, that the loudest, most seemingly outraged condemnations of the practices at Conklin have been from self-identified omnivores. If you go to message boards and read responses to articles, it becomes very clear that there are many who don't want the vegans to direct the discussion here. The idea put forth is that the demented worker who horribly abused those young cows was just that: demented. He should be removed from society. And, yes, Conklin should also pay for allowing this individual to do what he did, they should be fined and maybe they should be shut down.

The problem with this line of thinking is that it construes the violence as a series of isolated incidents that occurred in a sort of unique bubble of its own. Bringing the perpetrators to justice - which absolutely should be done - also gives the outraged a false sense of security that the "bad guys" are out of commission. What does this then mean? It means that omnivores can continue eating their turkey burgers, omelets and whipped cream coffee drink confections without a whiff of guilt by association. The psycho has been locked up. There is a problem, though: the animal products industries are constructed on a shared model of exploitation. Once you can say "what's yours is mine," meaning the milk, the eggs, the flesh that came from another, you are participating in a system that is firmly anchored in oppression. This is not to say that the people who work in animal agriculture are all deranged sadists torturing animals with crowbars. People tend to point to the exceptions, the idyllic little family farms with the red barns we have in our collective psyche, and convince themselves that this is the norm. It is not. Simply put, these quaint farms with the red barns cannot produce what the masses demand. The concentrated feeding operations and their practices are, instead, the norm, and they are the natural conclusion of getting demand for animal products met. (I should also point out that the sweet little farms that produce animal products are also built on a foundation of exploitation, just one that is less overtly abusive.)

Far more often than people would like to believe, the journey from farm (farm used in the loosest sense possible in the vast majority of cases) to plate or glass is steeped in harrowing, unjustifiable violence simply because of what it is. I mean harrowing, unjustifiable violence on top of that regular ol' violence that is inflicted whenever there is a desire for something that doesn't just happily hop on our plates, squirt milk into our glasses and otherwise gladly surrender her body for our cravings.

The process through which we make peace with the inherent injustice of how we treat non-humans occurs because of objectification, the largely unconscious fragmentation system through which sentient beings are turned into objects. It is easier for the mind to integrate the misuse of objects than the abuse of living beings. Through this process, individuation collapses: all cows, all hens become a single entity to be turned into product. Those who are in power have their interests interpreted as a natural right rather a personal desire. When our interests require the subjugation of another, objectification makes the acquiring of what we want that much easier. How do we begin to fragment living birds into deep-fried pieces inside a bucket, cows into hamburgers with ketchup and onions in a paper sack? They were not individual living beings: they were moving objects created to be segmented and formed into patties. The omnivores who are angered at Conklin Farms are denying or not understanding something very fundamental to animal agriculture, that it is intrinsically violent at its core. Again, it is violent because it is based on the notion that what's yours is mine. I understand people are saying, Yes, we want to eat our meat and drink our milk. Being cruel along the line, though, is unacceptable. The whole concept of taking from another when it's unnecessary and causes harm is, at the very least, ethically problematic. The abuser was just a short detour on that same path, and the people who don't want to change their eating practices are reluctant to admit that animal agriculture is based on exploitation that easily turns violent, even before the gruesome end. If they admit it and do not change their ways then they are accepting culpability. Again, fragmentation. It is easier to accept that a handful lunatics are running loose than that the very system of objectification breeds a culture of violent lunacy.

Why would the industries abuse the animals beyond what is necessary to turn cows into milk machines? Don't they need healthy suppliers? Why expend that energy when it's not necessary? Because they have been driven to insanity by the industry and because they can.

Violence associated with objectification is not isolated to non-human animals, of course. Look at the Nanking Massacre. Look at the concentration camps. The people were going to be killed, did they have to be raped, experimented upon, brutalized along the way? There is an insanity that accompanies institutionalized violence. Historically, where there is pervasive objectification, there is a terrifying violence that goes beyond the standard practice. We have a term for this: war crimes. This also shows our willful fragmentation. There is the accepted violence of war, and then there is "unnecessary" violence. This is the stuff that makes us uncomfortable. Rape, torture, brutal beatings, pillaging communities, enslavement. With objectification, this becomes standard practice because with objectification, any brutality becomes acceptable. When omnivores are decrying Conklin Farms, they fail to acknowledge the essential objectification, and thus the essential violence, of animal agriculture.

I believe that our job as animal advocates is to supplement the important exposés with the message that taking what doesn't belong to us is an intrinsically exploitative practice, and that the threat of violence (again, beyond what is accepted as necessary) naturally accompanies such a mentality. I am not expecting people to drop all animal products tomorrow. I am not expecting people to even reduce their consumption. But I am also not willing to be complicit in a lie: in the most diplomatic but honest way possible, I will tell people that when there is exploitation and objectification, our minds fragmentize and madness is just a heartbeat away. Where there is madness, violence is right around the corner. Anything else is a myth.