Our Descent Into Madness

Okay, everyone. This isn’t totally charitable and almost certainly isn’t What Jesus Would Do, but I feel a pressing emotional need to do it, and why else does the blogger blog?

Feel like reading this thread?

First of all, Elaine thinks that, while children intuitively don’t want to kill animals (true enough), it takes “more convincing” to get them disagree with the exploitation, abuse, rape, and borderline-enslavement of human workers.

Wow! Kids these days, right? With their inexplicable, almost sociopathic apathy about everything that affects people. You know kids! Not an empathetic one in the bunch. Except when it comes to fowl, of course.

But that’s not what I want to talk about here. After spending several posts and threads telling me that the fact that veganism takes effort is something we should completely disregard, she says:

And please don’t ignore the involved efforts to act morally. I completely agree with you that we have a moral imperative not to exploit other people. But a) I don’t think it’s OK to kill animals in order to not exploit people, and b) it’s so very difficult to not consume anything that hasn’t exploited someone but it’s very easy to not consume anything that hasn’t come from an animal. For instance, packaged foods must label ingredients, not human exploitation. It’s easy to read a label and tell if it’s part cow. It’s not so easy to read a label and tell if some people’s rights were violated, their land was taken, they were exposed to pesticides or they were otherwise exploited.

And then:

But your earlier point, that it takes extraordinary effort to eat ethically, is far more relevant to claims about humans than to claims about animals. That is, going vegan is a simpler ethical action and is much easier to promote widely than going local/ organic/ sustainable…

To which I said:

That’s true, but (any you will disagree with me here), I think going local/organic/sustainable is actually more important, from my admittedly anthropocentric perspective. That is, if all food production were local, organic, and sustainable, we would actually eliminate worker exploitation as well as all environmental consequences associated with food production, and toxins from pesticides and preservatives, and nutrient loss during shipping and freezing. If everyone were vegan, but it was still an industrialized, capitalist, unsustainable system, we would still have worker exploitation, still be messing up the environment in myriad ways (thereby harming wild animals), still be contributing to global warming, still be taking in toxins from pesticides and preservatives, still be losing nutrients in transport. Furthermore, while animals would still be slaughtered in the first scenario, they would all be healthy, kept in good conditions, etc., and, because our current levels of animal use are seriously wasteful and unsustainable, there would also be far fewer animals suffering. So the first situation seems clearly preferable to me.

It’s not a zero-sum game, though, fortunately. We can and should advocate both. But that is why I choose sustainability over veganism when I need to.

Which I maintain is reasonable, logical, and accurate. Her response, however, was:

“I think going local/organic/sustainable is actually more important”

Which is exactly why you think it’s too much of a burden to go vegan, because you don’t see it as all that important.
I think our conversation is over.

WOW. Wow. Just, wow.

Anyway, don’t worry, friends. That is the last conversation I will ever get into with her.

(Parts 1, 2.)

This post is likely to seem only tangentially related to the others, but they are very connected for me, sister cities in the geography of my mind. I said the first post began in the middle of the story; this one happens closer to the beginning. It is a meandering sort of post.

So, anybody study Kabbalah at all?

The foundational text of Kabbalah is the Zohar, which is a medieval work of mystical Torah commentary. “Torah” means law; “zohar” means light. People who like convenient aphorisms will tell you the Zohar is the lamp one holds to reveal the true meaning of the Torah.

Another very important foundational idea in Kabbalah is the Ten Sefirot, also called the Tree of Life. The way this was explained to me: the Tree of Life is a diagram of the Godhead. It is also a diagram of the soul. It is also a diagram of the world. It is also the map of the process of creation: it begins at Keter, the unified Godstate, unwinds and branches down into Malchut, the manifest world. The universe is a fractal, with the sefirot existing wholly at every level.

Here is a friendly diagram of the Tree of Life, which should serve you well for the purposes of this post:

(Image credit.)

Complete with English transliterations! For extra credit, compare and contrast with chakra systems.

Okay, onto the meat of the matter.

As you may know, I was a self-mutilator for a long time. Or am, maybe, in a “recovering alcoholic” sort of way. I would like to be able to pin this phase of my life down, to say, “I was a self-mutilator from 2001 to 2006,” but mutilation — what a tricky thing to put a box around. Do thoughts count? In many real ways, I think they do. What about acts that permanently changed the contours of my skin, but were carried out in love, or in a lovely form of madness? I wouldn’t count them, but I imagine anyone who happened to notice such a scar would not assume agreeable intentions, a gratifying memory.

During the worst periods, all four limbs and more became war zones. Overall, though, my attacks on myself were focused on a remarkably small area, the inside of my left forearm, the part closest to my elbow. Precisely where my tattoo is, on the other arm.

Of all the events of my adolescence, I can easily point to the one that had the greatest impact on reducing (and eventually stopping) my self-harm: coming out. Hundreds of thousands of pounds were lifted from my heart. I was visibly glowing for days, for weeks. Suddenly, finally, I felt love for my body.

It’s important to note that my coming out story is a little different from a typical one. I was fifteen; I had been struggling to puzzle out my sexual identity for a few years. For me, “coming out” wasn’t telling a secret I had known for years; it was realizing, understanding, accepting, and revealing the secret, all at once, in one great rush of wind.

I have often retrospectively conceptualized my self-mutilation as an attempt to literally cut parts of myself out. I wanted to cut out the queerness. And more: I would cut myself not when I was sad, but when I was furious. I was trying to tear my anger out of myself. It is obvious to me now that sex and rage — my rage at injustice, the anger that follows judgment — are my two strongest sources of power. I was trying to neutralize myself.

On the chart above, you can see that the second circle from the top in the left column is Gevurah. Gevurah is the sefirah associated with the left arm. And what ideas should it connote: judgment, fire, and ultimately, power.

On the right side, we have Chesed: love and kindness. It’s probable that this all happened because I am right-handed, but we are meaning-makers, so let us make meaning. This goes back to what I wrote in the first post about a disconnect between love and sex, which is a disconnect between Chesed and Gevurah, in my thinking.

In my misery, I wanted to amputate my rage and my hunger; so backwards was this desire that it perverted the forces of love and kindness into forces of brutality. And in doing so, of course, I did not get rid of my anger or my desire, I multiplied them. We only have two arms. In order to try to remove the cruel one, I had to turn the tender one into a weapon.

The severing of Chesed and Gevurah also happens when we try to make bold distinctions between nice, loving sex and intense, aggressive sex (something I did as I was first trying to understand things). The best sex, in my experience, is both and neither: the nice things are intensely nice, and the intense things nicely (pleasantly) intense; and we are aggressively loving, and lovingly aggressive.

The Tree of Life is also correlated to the major arcana of the Tarot. More precisely, the lines between the sefirot are connected to different cards. The bridge between Chesed and Gevurah is the eleventh card: Justice. For what is needed to make power and judgment just? Love. And what is manifestation of love? Power.

Here are some fun tools for viewing, parsing, comparing, and visualizing the data of a recent study done by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. There’s been some discussion around the blogosphere about the results, mostly regarding what they say about atheism, the number of secular people, and the rates at which people are leaving religious traditions. The really interesting thing about the afore links tools, though, in my opinion, is the opportunity to compare demographics across religions. So, for example, I decided to compare my group, Jews, against the group I sometimes think of as The Enemy: Evangelical Christians.* I learned that, on average, evangelicals are a significantly poorer and less educated than Jews. Just 3% of Jewish adults haven’t finished high school, compared to 16% of Evangelical adults, and 59% of Jews have a college degree or higher, compared to 20% of Evangelicals. Thirty-four percent of Evangelical adults make less than $30,000 a year, with 14% of Jews making the same, and 24% of Evangelicals make $75,000 or more, while 58% of Jews are in that income range.

Now, I can’t say I was that surprised to see that so many Jews get graduate degrees, stereotypes being what they are. The survey doesn’t contain any info about political beliefs, but if stereotypes will continue to serve us well, we can guess that, on average, Jews are significantly more progressive than Evangelicals.** Obviously, it’s no coincidence that the educated group is more progressive. That softens me a little to Evangelicals; it makes it seem more like they’re basically being taken advantage of by their leaders, to me, especially given that they’re comparatively poor. It’s abundantly clear that progressive policies are in the best interest of the poor, yet Republicans con them into opposing their own well-being via “God, Guns, and Gays” issues. Blah.

Anyway, I’m sure there are a lot of other interesting ways to breakdown those numbers. Explore.

* Though maybe they’re not, after all.

** Especially given that the research chooses to separate Evangelical churches from “mainline Protestant churches,” and that it reports that 41% of Jews are Reform.

Via Craft, take a look at this neat outdoor chandelier made by Alexander Reh with old milk jugs, a hula hoop, and string (and light bulbs). I imagine those old milk containers must give off the perfect muted glow.

Oh look, a lovely video of our official favorite plant.

(Via.)

After watching that, of course, I stumbled across all kinds of other beautiful/disturbing Venus flytrap footage. I don’t recommend exploring. Most of the them are gross and weirdly cruel.

Here, to a bad soundtrack, an innocent beetle meets its fate:

And here, a friendly Englishman explains the mechanics of the Venus flytrap, and other carnivorous plants:

The Onion News Network is reporting that, due to a software glitch, Diebold voting machines have accidentally leaked the results of our sham election early. Oh no!

Many hilarious lines. Watch the video.

Here’s a cool piece of furniture. It’s a crib that can shape-shift when for different functions. That Treehugger posts says it can serve as a crib, a toddler’s bed, and a rocking chair, but based on the photos in looks more like cradle, crib, chair to me. Either way it’s interesting. The idea is that it gets used for four years of a child’s life, instead of getting outgrown in one or two. After that it could get passed on to someone else, and then someone else, and on and on, hopefully.

Next, a related concept: a child’s chair that grows as she does. That one piece of furniture can be arranged into fully four different sorts of chair (for different ages and sitting situations), not to mention two tables. It’s definitely worth browsing the photos at that post to see the different permutations.

From Boing Boing Gadgets, check out this list of the ten best post-apocalyptic survival vehicles, complete with pictures. I can’t say I’m a fan of enormous, gas-guzzling machines of death, but they are certainly imaginative, and once the collapse comes, we will all do whatever we have to do. Some of them seem to be fictional, while others are far too real.

You can vote on which of the top ten is the ultimate post-apocalyptic survival vehicle. I’m endorsing the Sisu XA-185 — it’s the one I’d most want to have in a total chaos situation (assuming I could power it on a combination of sunshine and the blood of our fallen enemies). Other highlights include Wothahellizat and the Dobbertin Surface Orbiter.

I’ve been building myself into an igloo of books surrounding my bed.* I hope to emerge soon, for a bit…

Luckily, though, Daisy’s really been picking up the slack! Keep that keyboard polished, Daisy.

*I wish this was true in more than a metaphorical sense.

~Emily

By way of introduction: Elaine Vigneault wrote a post claiming that since some people of color are vegans/vegetarians, there is no element of privilege whatsoever to veg*nism, and it’s offensive to claim there is. I responded by saying that, since it is a lot easier for some people to afford fresh, healthy produce than others, there is an element of privilege. She responded that there are cheap veg*an options — PB&J, lentils — therefore there is nothing privileged whatsoever about it. I responded to that with a story about our friend Brenden:

My best friend is at school at the big public university in our state. Even though he’s got an excellent deal on his tuition, he’s busting his ass to pay room and board. Since he has absolutely no extra money and lives on campus, eating in the cafeteria is his only option. And, having eaten there myself while visiting him, I can tell you that being a vegetarian there would be incredibly difficult (it was difficult for me to pull off for a weekend), and being a vegan definitely impossible (unless we expect him to only eat the very limited selection of fruit they provide, which would not be healthy). So, no one’s got any business tell him his situation isn’t an excuse to eat meat; he would love to have other options, but for the moments, he doesn’t. He’s white, but his family is poor. My other best friend and I are both students too, but because our families have more money, neither of us has any kind of problem being vegetarians.

. . . I think the only thing I’m trying to say is: it is one thing to ask someone who can easily access a healthy veg*n diet to do so. Asking someone for whom that would be incredibly difficult or impossible is a different kind of question. Not that we shouldn’t ask and encourage those people, but it’s not the same thing.

To which she responded:

I disagree that your friend’s lack of funds trumps his moral duty to avoid meat. Even in a cafeteria like that, there are options.

Before college, I was in the Conservation Corps. It was a similar situation to your friend’s. I lived on campus and had to eat at the cafeteria and had no extra money for anything. So I told the head chef I was vegetarian. It took a few weeks but finally they made me special meals.(in he meantime I ate PB&J sandwiches). I ate a lot of the same things over and over because the chef wouldn’t get creative, but I survived. And other people often chose the veg option, too, all because I asked for it.

To which I responded that he has literally no extra money (no PB&J for him), and that, while it’s possible the university would listen and change their menu, there is no guarantee, and anyway, asking him to do that is asking a lot more of him than asking be to just not buy meat.

Okay, here’s where I decided I want to post that. She than said, verbatim, emphasis hers:

Really, he’s in college. College. He can’t use excuses like ‘I’m not privileged enough’. He’s in college.

He’s not a good example of the poor people you’re talking about. And those poor people? To go veg, they need education more than money. (They need money for other things, but not veganism). Veganism is NOT a money thing. It’s an education thing.

Mother. Of. God.

I can’t wait till Brenden finds out he’s actually not poor. He will be so excited.

And, an update, in which she said:

He obviously simply places a low priority on ethical eating and a higher priority on convenience.

Like I said before, there are always some veg students at any college. If he just asked the cafeteria, they will likely provide him with a veg option. His excuse is just that, an excuse. He’s just not ready to do what it takes to live a more ethical lifestyle. There are certainly social barriers, but the choice is ultimately his to make.

I’m just reprinting this here so I can figure out whether she’s insane or I am, by the way. I’m pretty sure it’s not me, but it’s good to get a second opinion.