The Sanity of Compassion...

Back when my son was two, I was bored to tears with reading him Lyle Crocodile all the time. One evening, I grabbed The Lorax from the bookshelf on a whim for our night-time reading ritual; I didn’t know how much he would be able to take away from it but I was determined to avoid reading about the house on East 88^th Street for just one night. My son was speaking a little at this age, not a lot yet, so I didn’t know how much he would understand from a more complex book like The Lorax, but I desperately needed a change in the rotation.

We snuggled together and I was happily reading along until I got to the end, when the last Truffula tree was struck down. I suddenly heard a gasp. It came from my son. I turned to look at him and tears were streaming down his cheeks: “No more tees!” he cried, pointed at the page, his eyes wide. “No more tees!” I was in disbelief: I was so lost in the story myself I had no idea that not only was he following along, he was deeply engrossed. My son screamed and wailed. I quickly skipped ahead in the book to the page where the little boy was given the last Truffula seed by the Once-ler.

“See? It’s okay,” I said, trying to soothe him, still taken aback myself. “The boy can plant the seed. He can save the trees. He’ll plant more.” My son wasn’t having it. I explained that it was just a book, it wasn’t real, but he still sobbed himself to sleep that night, sniffling and his breath catching until he finally drifted off. When my husband came home that night, I was still shaken. I told him what had happened. “Well,” he said, “on the bright side, it is probably not going to be any trouble getting him to embrace being vegan.”

In the moment of learning that the last beautiful Truffula tree had been chopped down, my two-year-old felt the injustice of that action so personally that he cried out in pain and anguish, as if he himself had been struck with an axe. There was no separation between my son and the trees; as children do, he loved trees – they are mysterious, majestic, providing sanctuary for many creatures – and his reaction made sense. We should cry out when we see such senseless acts of destruction. Eight years later, my son is still viscerally empathetic to others who are vulnerable. This response is natural, normal and sane. I was reminded of this last weekend.

We had gone away with our network of Chicago area vegan families for our annual weekend out of town together. This year, we went to the Mad City Vegan Festival in Wisconsin, about 2 ½ hours from Chicago, in lovely Madison. My son and his friend, also a vegan, had wandered into one of the rooms while they were screening Vegucated. I have not seen it yet but there were some graphic scenes of cruelty to animals. Apparently it is a small part of the film but it made a big impression on the kids. My son and his friend were so upset they left the room, not able to keep watching the movie.

Before they left, they saw animals shoved into cages without any consideration. They saw slaughterhouses and tortured cows, chickens and pigs. It made their eyes well up and, afterward, it made them angry.

Not knowing they had seen the movie, I noticed them sitting at a nearby table, looking uncharacteristically subdued and sad. I sat down next to them and they told me about what they had seen, how upsetting it was to them.

“The animals are killed just for sandwiches and chicken nuggets,” my son said. He has these soulful, dewy eyes that can rip my heart out, especially at moments like this.

“They just cram them into cages. They kill the pigs and then they shred them into bacon,” said my son’s friend, shaking his head. “Baconism has to end!"

“It’s not worth it, is it?” I said.

“No!”

My son has been raised as a vegan. He has never known another way. He does, however, know that the vast majority of people do not live like us. We’ve always been mindful about not attaching anything “extra” to this fact, allowing him to analyze and understand the eating of animals through his own processes but being there for him for discussion. There are people he loves – his grandmother, a good number of his friends, all of his relatives – who do not look at our place in the world the same way we do and he accepts that he’s different, we’re different. My son has never minded this all that much and he has always embraced and been proud of his identity as a vegan. I think, though, because it is something that he has always been, he hasn’t spent a lot of time thinking about how it might feel to those who are born to be consumed, the actual lives they have. He understands, of course, that animals are killed for food but until he saw those scenes in the movie, I think it was mostly conceptual. Seeing the animals abused with his own eyes, though, made the cruelty very real to my son and his friend. Their suffering was inescapably concrete, no longer just an abstraction.

I recognized something in their faces that afternoon as the three of us talked about their thoughts. I recognized that feeling of knowing that they had seen something that will alter their perspective forever. There is a loss of innocence with that, this knowing that you cannot go back and “unsee” but there is great freedom with it, too. There is a liberation we gain from being allowed the unfiltered truth. In them, I also recognized the same feeling of being stupefied by the business-as-usual approach to the life-and-death matters of animal agriculture as well as the purifying fire that seeing a clear, inexcusable injustice sparks within us. After ten years of being vegan, I saw my son deeply internalize his values on his own terms. He had always happily embraced veganism but seeing what he saw crystallized it for him in a new way.

The next day, our group went to an animal sanctuary near Madison. The kids held roosters, petted pigs, fed goats and helped to clean and prepare the space for a summer camp. They were able to enjoy themselves in a setting far removed from their usual urban lives. The kids were excited to see the animals but felt sadness knowing how few actually manage to find true sanctuary. This is a sane, emotionally intelligent response to exploitation: if you don’t feel sad for the other beings that are suffering immensely, you have turned something off. These kids are not conditioned; they are not indoctrinated. It’s the opposite. Their heads, and their hearts, are wide open.

We live in a deeply and unnecessarily violent world. Outrage and rebellion against systemic injustice is a terrific and reassuring response. Thank goodness for the people who cry out when others get cut down: they are our hope for the future.

Global Vegan Domination: The Plan

All right, Sally Fallon, Nina Planck and Fox News, you’ve discovered our secret plan. It’s time to stop beating around the bush and time to lay our cards on the table. We are a reasonable people. It’s not a big deal. It’s just that from every corner of the world, we herbivores are mating and adopting children with the intention of creating an army of cold-eyed vegan spawn who will swat the hot dogs right out of your innocent hands. They won’t say a word and that will be the most menacing part of this assault on your civil liberties: they will just get a mean little squint in their eyes and then boom - your hot dog will be on the ground. Omnivore, it doesn’t matter if you’re clutching fast-food chicken sandwiches or grass-fed beef, conventional dairy or free-range eggs: our child army will find you and that is when you’ll realize that acid reflux is the least of your problems. Look around the playground. See that little boy on the swings, the girl in braids hanging from the parallel bars?

They are watching you.

They are not happy.

We are not happy.

Oh, we are so pissed but we have plans. We are so certain that we will be victorious that we’re letting you know what our plans are.

First, we will take your jobs. All superiors will also be replaced with one of us. You will be sent packing without a sad little party or even a card. We will fill every staff kitchen and vending machine with flax crackers, dehydrated acai berries and coconut water. This will be our fuel. Doubt us? Who is going to have the stamina, the ability to outrun, climb, dodge and outwit? The omnivores? Good one. And who is going to have the dogged persistence and fortitude necessary for such a bold uprising? Who are the ones who have been told to “eat around” meat, dealt with annoying questions at Thanksgiving and have been the punch line to every single office comedian’s joke for-freaking-ever. That’s right. It’s going to be the vegans. This includes political office, too, in case you were wondering.

Then we’re going to move in next door to you. We’re going to rip out all the grass and plant every variety of kale we can get our hands on - curly, red, lacinto – so every neighborhood is a sea of leafy greens. We’re going to ferment cabbage with the windows open all summer long. And who is that looking over the fence or balcony at you while you’re grilling dead animal parts? Why, it’s us and our cold-eyed children. We will direct delivery trucks dropping off our weekly supply of nutritional yeast to double-park in front of your car and we will run our high-speed blenders at 6:00 in the morning on weekends just to be mean because that is who we are. Our kids will have green smoothie lemonade stands and teach your kids about the enslavement of so-called food animals. Next, they will cover circuses, rodeos, vivisection. If you think we’re bad, you will shudder when you meet our children. They have chlorophyll for blood, an implant that screens Meet Your Meat continuously in their heads and they are unstoppable.

Next, we will take over the schools. The new schedules will look like this:

First period: Sun salutations

Second period: Strategies in total global domination

Third period: Classics in revolutionary literature

Fourth period: Movement theory workshop

Fifth period: Vegan potluck

Sixth period: Omnivorous atrocities through the ages

Seventh period: Vegan rock star chorus

Eighth period: The social science of insurgencies

Our schools will have classroom after classroom filled with cold-eyed vegan children and teenagers raised on tofu scramble and filled with revolutionary zeal. In short, you’re screwed.

Finally, we become the media. When Big Vegan takes over, not only will we write and report the news, we will determine all the programming and create the content. Every sitcom, reality show, talk show and drama will be developed from a vegan framework and overtly designed to topple omnivorism. A sample on any given night? NBC: A vegan confronts her family about their blatant speciesism on the Kathy Freston Show. HBO: Four stylish best friends representing different archetypes navigate the ups-and-downs of the NYC vegan dating scene (Episode 4: Eleanor feels insecure when her boyfriend flirts with the hot young anarchist at the Occupy Omnivorism protest. Should they break up?) Bravo: The Real Vegan Power Couples of the Bay Area. You don’t like television? We will run all newspapers and radio stations as well. None of this is close to approximating the international arsenal of bloggers we are prepared to unleash, either.

So, as you can see, we will be infiltrating everything. We will be everywhere. We will be the judge when you are contesting a traffic ticket. We will be the parents of the girl you are trying to impress. We will run the neighborhood zoning committee and will be on the board of your condo association. We will be the ones who switched on the police car lights you just noticed in your rear view mirror.

It’s best just to submit, omnivore. It’s happening.

You can’t say we didn’t warn you. 

When Vegans (Almost) Rule the World...

When vegans (almost) rule the world, vegan nutritionists will be consulted on mainstream news stories about omnivorous diets. They will look very concerned and, while saying that it might be possible to not die prematurely as an omnivore, those people should be very careful with their meal planning.

When vegans (almost) rule the world, omnivores will complain amongst themselves about all the photos their herbivorous friends upload onto Facebook of their animal-free food. "Ugh, do I need to see this all the time?" they will say. "Is there no safe haven?"

When vegans (almost) rule the world, expectant omnivorous parents will be asked, "Well, I understand that you eat animal products, but you're not planning to force that upon your child, are you?"

When vegans (almost) rule the world, omnivores will dread every Thanksgiving. They will have to get together with their vegan relatives and sit silently as dish after dish is served, not even a piece of turkey or anything else from an animal on the table. They will wish that on a holiday, they could just be accepted for who they are.

When vegans (almost) rule the world, meat-eaters will have to eat the foul, cobbled together Omnivore Plate at weddings.

When vegans (almost) rule the world, once identified as meat-eaters, omnivores will have to listen to stories from co-workers about "the cousin of a friend of my neighbor whose son was dating an omnivore and she got really sick and died" and that sort of thing. 

When vegans (almost) rule the world, the best chefs will roll their eyes at omnivorous requests. "I cannot work with such inferior ingredients," they will say. "Those with boring, unsophisticated palates and extreme limitations shouldn't come to my restaurant expecting to eat."

When vegans (almost) rule the world, omnivores will be irritated by how they are depicted on television ("So stereotypic!") and they will be crushed when their favorite meat-eating celebrities jump ship and start promoting veganism. "It just makes us all look flaky."

When vegans (almost) rule the world, it will be implied that omnivores are pushy and out-of-touch when they try to defend their eating habits.

When vegans (almost) rule the world, omnivorous parents will worry that their children's packed lunches don't look appetizing. They will also hope that their children's lunches don't draw too much negative attention to them.

When vegans (almost) rule the world, omnivores will be bitterly disappointed when they discover that their carry-out food has vegetables all over it and no meat.

When vegans (almost) rule the world, smart phones will have special apps to help omnivores find the restaurants that serve meat.

When vegans (almost) rule the world, omnivores will be competitive with each other over how long they've been omnivorous and judge one another for their motivations for eating meat.

When vegans (almost) rule the world, meat-eaters will hear stories from people at parties about how they used to be omnivorous but they had to quit because it was just too hard. Plus, they felt too weak and sickly.

When vegans (almost) rule the world, omnivores will feel uncomfortable when people stare at their food with a mixture of disgust and morbid curiosity. "Ew! What was that?" people will say.

When vegans (almost) rule the world, it will be implied that men who are omnivores are wimps and women who are omnivores are on crazy diets. Never mind. When vegans (almost) rule the world, we'll be done with that nonsense.

When vegans (almost) rule the world, meat-eaters will lament the lack of positive role models and wish that they didn't publicly embarrass each other all the time. Omnivores who argue with each other are accused of "hurting the movement."

When vegans (almost) rule the world, when two meat-eaters get married, their friends will ask, "You're not going to have an omnivorous wedding, are you?"

When vegans (almost) rule the world, omnivores will be derided for eating mock tofu and faux tempeh and they will be told that no one understands why they'd want to eat an imitation of something that they supposedly don't like. It will be implied that they are clearly stifling their inner-vegan.

When vegans (almost) rule the world, some omnivores will be told that they look healthy despite their habits.

When vegans (almost) rule the world, when groups of omnivores and vegans go out to eat together, the omnivores just know that they will have to suffer through some half-assed meal by a chef who doesn't know how to cook "their" food.

When vegans (almost) rule the world, it will be implied that omnivores must have a ton of willpower to live the way that they do.

When vegans (almost) rule the world, omnivores will meet each other through the website MeatyDate.com.

When vegans (almost) rule the world, whenever omnivores adopt a dog or cat, they will be asked what they will feed them.

When vegans (almost) rule the world, it will be assumed that any ailment or injury an omnivore has is directly linked to that person's diet.

When vegans (almost) rule the world, it will be implied that omnivores are hypocrites if they wear non-leather shoes.

When vegans (almost) rule the world, omnivores will roll their eyes every time someone asks them where they get their fiber.

When vegans (almost) rule the world, omnivores will always be accused of having an agenda.

When vegans (almost) rule the world, it will be implied that omnivores are uptight, inhibited puritans, chomping on dead bodies, ovum and secretions, when it's clear that luscious fruits and vegetables are what the sexy people eat.

When vegans (almost) rule the world, omnivores will be told collectively to get a life.

Dear Alicia Silverstone...

Dear Alicia,

Hi! How are you? It seems like I should be writing this letter in purple ink with my rounded handwriting and slipping it in your locker but I’m hampered by circumstances. I will concede that it’s kind of awkward approaching you in this very public way. Ideally I’d just put this note in your locker or your desk or your hand surreptitiously as we passed in the hall but I still don’t think you seem like the kind of person who would mind getting a public letter. Maybe it is presumptuous of me but you seem like an easygoing, unpretentious type of person. Also, this is the only way I thought of that could potentially reach you so there’s that.

I’ll start out by saying that I think you’re fabulous, but I’m not saying it in that fawning way that people like me might speak to people like you. I’m not one who fawns, anyway, though I totally love baby deer, which I suspect you do, too. (So cute.) Nor am I being sarcastic, though that is my natural default setting. You just seem like someone who smiles easily, has fun, doesn’t buy into the terrifying Kardashianization of Western culture that threatens to swallow us all, which seems like a trite thing to point out but isn’t. Plus you’re vegan, which is a big ol’ plus in my book, of course. I’m being serious, Alicia: I appreciate you and your approachable example of a life well lived.

So please keep in mind when I say what I’m going to say that I like you as much as I can like someone I don’t know. You seem like you’d be a lot of fun at a party and I would totally tell you funny stories over tempeh burgers on gluten-free buns that would make you laugh. Hard, too. So this is it: please, for the love of all that is good in the world, please don’t ever spit up food into your baby’s mouth again. At least don’t do it on camera again and then load it onto the internet.

There. That’s it.

As someone who has been in front of cameras from a young age, you must be somewhat image conscious. I don’t mean it with that shallow, la dee dah “I’m so superficial” connotation we have with the word “image.” (The word itself has an image problem, which is kind of funny.) With image, I mean the impression we are sending the world by how we’re perceived through our actions. Human mothers feeding their babies using the mouth as a means of transportation just is going to be problematic. A vegan mother doing this with her vegan baby is, like, a million times worse. I’m not saying that feeding your baby this way is right or wrong. It’s not for me but I also don’t care. Frankly, I wouldn’t care if you fed your baby on the wings of a mourning dove you rescued or in a hemp seed-encrusted coconut shell sent to you by Woody Harrelson over the Pacific ocean. I really don’t care. Once it gets into the public domain, though, I start to care.

You have to understand that I don’t mean to be harsh, Alicia. It’s just that many in the world consider parents raising vegetarian children to be nutty and that those of us raising vegan children should pretty much be on the DCFS “frequent visitation” list. Do we need to, you know, take this up a notch by pre-chewing and then spitting food into our children’s mouths on camera? I think vegans appear on most internal Orange Alert lists even without such provocations.

I get that this reveals such screwed up values, believe me. People are saying that feeding your baby this way is unsanitary and, meanwhile, they’re feeding their children assorted animal parts that have been “sanitized” with ammonia. Pretty messed up, right? And it’s better that the media should cover the eccentric style in which a celebrity feeds her baby then, like, dedicate time to exposing war, violence and climate change, right? Ugh. We wouldn’t want that.

This is the world we live in, though, and these are the values. Given this reality, and that veganism fundamentally disrupts some core presumptions, I think we need to minimize the weirdness whenever we can. Which is not to say that a whitewashed, generic world void of personal idiosyncrasies is what we should aspire to but to many people, we are the only vegans they know, and that is already quite weird enough.

Maybe also we should get a better handle on “good weird” and “bad weird” in general: good weird is associated with chutzpah and charm. The average person with any taste can’t help wishing that he or she had some of that distinctive, confident style. Bad weird unnerves. It disgusts. It sends eyes searching for the nearest exit. It is the difference between climbing a tree just for the heck of it and imitating a mother robin by pre-masticating your baby’s food and then spitting it into his mouth. This is a wide gulf, you know? Yes, I get that it’s all in the eyes of the beholder and kind of arbitrary but I still think you know what I mean. There’s all kinds of wiggle room there.

I have been bad weird as an outspoken vegan more times that I care to admit. My stint as a vegan stretches way back into the mid-1990s so let’s just say that sometimes I was That One who screamed at strangers in the grocery store. And dressed up as a scary clown at the rodeo and/or circus protest. And dropped banners from viaducts while raising my arms triumphantly. I do not regret that passion or those convictions one iota nor have they diminished; that’s not what the message of this is about. It’s just that when you live a public life as a vegan, you represent more than just you. Because we are still so small in number, we represent each other. I know it’s unfair, but that’s life.

So maybe keep the quirkier of your home movies to yourself and your immediate family. One day you and your baby’s father will watch the movies together and you will sigh, “Aw, hon, remember when little Bear Blu used to let me spit food into his mouth?” But when the rest of the world thinks that skimming an ingredient panel is straight up bizarre, this is just too much, Alicia.

Know what I mean?

So please keep living your eco-fabulous, vegan life and know that I appreciate what you do. You’re kind and natural and the real deal. I’m even not ashamed to admit that I’ve written a novel that I think would be awesome for you to get behind. (What would I have done in the old days if this were an actual letter and I couldn’t put a link here?) I hope that I didn’t hurt your feelings. It’s not you, it’s the world. We’ve got a lot to do – a ton – and we can’t afford to let people get hung up on this silly stuff that really doesn’t matter.

Onward and upward, right?

Take care, Alicia. I just think that from now on, you should let your little guy chew and swallow food on his own, okay? It’ll be character building. You know I’m not mad. Let’s just all vow to do a little better. The eyes of the world are upon us.

xo,

Marla

Hungry for Underdogs

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” Flannery O’Connor

Last weekend, I saw The Hunger Games. I went into it with a lot of apprehension. I think John was surprised when I told him that I would see the film with him as I had been steadfastly avoiding the trilogy ever since it first appeared in our home a couple of years ago. The stark spines have been staring out at me from our bookshelf ever since and I looked past them even when I was desperate for a new book to begin. Something – probably the movie – motivated me to crack open the first one. I started the novel and a week later, we planned to see the film.

I am not one for dystopian fiction as a genre in general. When we know that Treblinka, the Nanking Massacre, the Bosnian war and the horrific Rwandan genocide really did exist, not in the annals of our history books but in fairly recent years, I wonder why it’s necessary to imagine a dark and violent world. I worry that it makes people complacent about the dark and violent world we already inhabit. I consider myself an optimist for the most part but it seems to me that we have demonstrated time-and-time again throughout human history that it doesn’t take much kindling for us to explode in a powder keg of sadism and barbarism toward one another. I’m referring to really ugly, premeditated and sustained brutality that requires the consent of a large percentage of population, too, not just random flashes of violence. If objectification is the spark, disconnection and paranoia are the fuel. Perhaps we are hardwired for it, too, programmed deep inside the reptilian part of the human brain. This is why dystopian fiction has little appeal to me: it’s too real.

Unless, of course, people can extrapolate from these very imaginable story lines and see how our current world easily contains the seeds for the frightening future described. This has been the most interesting aspect of the Hunger Games phenomenon to me: the premise of teens killing teens for the entertainment of the elite was turned into a massively popular series and now film. How is it affecting the consciousness of readers about our contemporary world? Could it awaken people to the gross disparities in the world, the dangers of voyeurism, detachment and oligarchic power structures? Does the story lead to more penetrating insights and questions? Or has the series been spun like cotton candy into more pop culture pabulum, a cautionary tale in and of itself, consumed and enjoyed without much consideration? This is not radically different from how the wealthy in Panem’s Capitol relish the annual fight to the death in The Hunger Games. 

These questions have caused me no shortage of angst. Given that there are disparities in our world, we like to think that we root for the disenfranchised, the scrappy survivors. The outward support of underdogs is woven into the fabric of our human narrative. From Harry Potter to Jay Gatsby, Norma Rae to Katniss Everdeen, we love cheering on those with the odds stacked against them. It’s a source of pride: I root for the underdogs. We like what we think that says about us, that we root for David over Goliath. 

Is this how it plays out in real life, though?

In the film, Seneca Crane, the Head Gamemaker (the lead person behind the scenes who helps to direct, create and manipulate the environment the Tributes are fighting on) has a conversation with President Snow that was very telling. President Snow is unhappy with how the Games are going and the conversation leads back to the Katniss somehow managing to elude a gruesome death thus far. The President is displeased.

The Gamemaker, sensing that he has to sell this unexpected angle, says, “I mean, everyone loves a good underdog.”

President Snow icily shuts him down. “I don’t. There are lots of underdogs and I think if you could see them, you would not root for them either.”

This is very true. If an actual downtrodden person were in front of the cold-blooded Seneca Crane, he would avoid that person at any cost. The idea that we like to align with the underdog is a story we tell ourselves, not necessarily something that applies to real life. Harry Potter, the ostracized and weird orphan with the scar on his forehead? We adore him in fictionalized form. In real life, though, I’m not so sure. Norma Rae, the status quo-disrupting firebrand? Keep your distance.

As vegan, of course, I cannot help but see an analogy to the billions of animals killed every year, killed largely because we want to keep enjoying the things we enjoy and maintain our status in the hierarchy we engineered. The quintessential underdogs are the animals humans eat: the birds in captivity, the fish suffocating in giant nets, the calves taken from their mothers, the mothers forced into pregnancy after pregnancy until death. If we were truly empathetic to the exploited and disadvantaged, the narrative we like to tell ourselves, wouldn’t we naturally strive toward being vegan? Wouldn’t that be the best way to root for those who have been institutionally tyrannized?

I think we need to stop repeating this line that we root for the oppressed and have an honest reckoning with ourselves. Do we really? Or do we draw the line at the liberties don’t want to give up? The flesh, the milk, the eggs: are they worth the suffering we inflict and the delusion we sell ourselves? We are better than this. We need to stop repeating this lie that we can care about others and we can exploit them at the same time. 

Monkeywrench the machinery. Opt out. Take a real stand for the underdog. Go vegan.

Collective Nouns for Fun and Sport...

Sometimes, the very best way to express the nature of an assemblage of beings who share something in common – a trait, a philosophy, a species - is through a really apt collective noun. Chillingly, a group of crows is referred to as a “murder,” much like a group of lions is referred to as a “pride.” I think it’s time to add more to the common vernacular because, really, how many times can you say that that “group” or, even clumsier, “bunch” of foodies in your office is really working your nerves before you long for something that is both more precise and more vivid? How much time do we waste trying to come up with something more elegant and fitting until we fall back on one of those standbys again? Before your hackles get raised, please bear in mind that I belong to several of the classifications below (see: vegan, feminist, Chicagoan, mother, Jewish) and this is all in the interest of strengthening our linguistic muscle.

Hence, here are some new collective nouns to consider:

A douchebag of hipsters.

An eye-roll of teenaged girls.

An annoyance of vegans.

A meltdown of toddlers.

A closet of right-wing politicians.

A drag of dieters.

A tremor of coffee drinkers.

A Spock of sci-fi fans.

A nitpicking of grammarians.

A judgment of evangelical Christians.

A stench of environmentalists.

A Gingrinch of narcissists.

A smug of foodies.

A harassment of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

A furnace of climate change deniers.

A contusion of Black Friday shoppers.

A swoon of Leonard Cohen fans.

A scowl of feminists.

A squirm of kindergarteners.

An extravagance of theater majors.

A sacrifice of Jewish mothers.

A reflux of drive-thru diners.

A lurch of frat boys.

An expletive of bike messengers.

A smirk of college Republicans.

A hot flash of menopausal women.

A Panera of suburbanites.

A hit of Chicagoans.

A stint of 18-year-old bisexuals.

A salmonella of cafeteria workers.

A bore of historians.

A confusion of map readers.

A greenwash of organic meat consumers.

A grunt of weight-lifters.

A wimp of Democrats.

A colonic of Californians.

A distance of Protestants.

A hormone of teenaged boys.

A snicker of satirists.

A haplessness of TV dads.

A scorn of TV moms.

A mindfuck of Dadaists.

A gasp of new mothers.

A stent of meat-lovers.

A prostate of Civil War reenactors.

A pox of Renaissance Faire workers.

A conceit of New Yorkers.

A hypocrite of Republicans.

A melanoma of sun-bathers.

An outbreak of reality TV stars.

A scab of skateboarders.

A shrill of Tea Partiers.

A hoard of cat lovers.

A pomposity of university professors.

A projection of amateur psychologists.

A terror of birthday clowns.

A callous of Libertarians.

A smite of Creationists.

A predation of bank executives.

A preening of Los Angelenos. 

A smear of lawyers.

A gloating of DIY crafters.

Do you have any to add? (By the way, any newcomers, please check out the website for my new novel, The Adventures of Vivian Sharpe, Vegan Superhero.) 

Why We Need New Superheroes...

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive." Attributed to Howard Thurman.

We don’t need any more superheroes with steely eyes but instead ones with eyes that blink, glaze over, roll on occasion and maybe even cry.

We need superheroes who think and feel.

We don’t need any more superheroes with chiseled jaws and unmovable hair. We’ve had enough of those.  

We need superheroes who occasionally feel like hiding under the blankets and just hitting the snooze button a few times.

We don’t need any more superheroes who can deflect bullets with stylish wristlets or broad, barrel-like chests but instead those who are every bit as vulnerable as anyone not of the superheroic persuasion.

We need superheroes who are more or less equipped like everyone else.

What makes them superheroes, then? Aren’t they just boring, average, blah? What makes this person different from our cousins, mail carriers or Zumba instructors?

There are latent superhero tendencies in all of us. It’s who we are when we see an injustice and cannot stay quiet. A superhero heeds a call to step up to the plate, summoned by his or her conscience, because the thought of not doing so is impossible to accept. Even though this will require a leap of faith, a superhero is asked to go on a journey that necessitates leaving the world of predictability and safe familiarity behind. When asked to do this, the superhero ultimately says yes. This doesn’t mean that the superhero is fearless or shot through with confidence. They aren’t. This doesn’t mean that the superhero never has a doubt. They do. It means that despite this, they go into uncharted territory and this is what makes one person a superhero and another merely human. Superheroes commit to following through.

Superheroes arrive to us in all forms. Vivian Sharpe arrived to me in steam rising from my cup of tea, appearing like a genie.

The seed of the idea of writing a novel with a vegan superhero was planted one night at Kopi Café in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood, where I sat with my husband as we brainstormed ideas for new t-shirt designs. We had an online magazine and clothing company back then called Vegan Street. As we tossed out ideas, suddenly a figure appeared in my mind: she was in a green unitard and a cape, with vivid red hair splayed out against the sky. She was armed with a bunch of celery. Her unitard said “V-Girl” and her slogan was “Keeping Animals Off Your Plates.”

After that night, I kept thinking about her, not just as a t-shirt or even a character but as a person. The vision of V-Girl seized me, stamped itself on my consciousness and wouldn’t relent. I decided that V-Girl needed a backstory, so I started fleshing her out. The simple backstory kept evolving, though, from a cartoonish character who leaped and bounded and scaled buildings until all the superhero tropes were eventually stripped away and I was left with a teenaged girl named Vivian Sharpe from a Midwestern town. Other than still having red hair, she bore no resemblance to the character who appeared that night at Kopi. The longer I chipped away at the raw material of her, the more what emerged was a complex, fallible, nuanced, flesh-and-blood person. Try as I might, Vivian Sharpe stubbornly refused to be molded into any kind of conventional superhero: she was her own person and she wanted me to tell her story. Just like there was no controlling Vivian, the image with the slogan became a short story, which then became a novella and, finally, a novel. It took years for me to find my way down the path, there were tons of twists and turns and certainly no trail of breadcrumbs. In addition, I had a baby to raise, paying work to find and do, and a festival to help organize. All that time, Vivian was here for me.

When I’d try to take an easy out to a plot twist, she’d let me know, and my thoughts would go cloudy, my hands would be unable to write an easy resolution. When things got stressful and complicated for me as a writer, when I thought I might have painted myself into a corner and wasted years on this project, she’d encourage me to buck up and trust the process. She was like a rare friend who will be honest with you and always hold you to the highest standard. Sometimes you are going to hate a friend like this but once you get beyond your pride and fear, you will have to admit that you are lucky to have her guiding influence. This was Vivian in my life.

Even though I didn’t originally set out to write a novel about a teenaged vegan superhero, I believe that my subconscious mind was telling me that the time was right and the thought that sparked then manifested as Vivian Sharpe. The story wouldn’t relent until it was told. To read more about the story, characters and plot, please visit here and here.

We need real flesh-and-blood superheroes because the world is kind of a mess. Lex Luthor, the Joker and Doctor Doom in their most feverishly misanthropic imaginings, could never come up with the pickles the human race has gotten into because of our prioritizing of profits over planetary survival. Why couldn’t a 15-year-old girl be a wide-awake, tuned-in agent of change? Who would be better? Vivian can’t leap a tall building in a single bound (or even twenty), she can’t zoom through the clouds or spout webs from her wrists but she has all she needs. She can change the world when she plugs into her power source. It turns out that that’s the best that any of we mortals can hope for, too. 

Superman can sit this one out.