This
is a dark post about human nature and our aversion to facing awful
truths. It is not appropriate for children, and the squeamish may also
want to give it a pass.
The title of this article is a quote from another great speech
by Bill Moyers, at the Conference for America's Future last Friday. In
it, Moyers talks mainly about the subject of my post yesterday: What we
do, and do not, pay attention to. He's under fire from Ken Tomlinson,
the neocons' hatchetman for public broadcasting, for trying to draw
attention to the chasm between rich and poor, the disappearance of the
American middle class, and of class mobility, the disgrace of the
American public education system, the passion of DeLay and Abramoff and
the rest of the neocon crew for sweatshops, offshoring and a
starvation-level minimum wage, the naked power of corporatist
lobbyists, the timidity of the mainstream media, and "what little
protection ordinary citizens retain against corporate leviathans that
cheat, exploit, injure and poison them, trap them in hopeless jobs,
renege on their healthcare and default on their pensions".
"What has happened to working Americans", he says, "is not the result
of Adam Smith's benign and invisible hand but the direct consequence of
corporate money, ideological propaganda, a partisan political religion,
and a string of political decisions favoring the interests of wealthy
elites who bought the political system right out from under us." In
other words, it is the Gilded Age, the Industrial Era's greatest shame, all over again. So perhaps it should come as no surprise to learn today that Philip Cooney,
long-time stooge for the American Petroleum Institute who was rewarded
by Bush with the title of Chief of the Council on Environmental
Quality, routinely falsified, doctored and censored scientific reports
on global warming before releasing them to the media or to the
president. The neocons don't want us to know, and often if it's bad
news, we don't really want to know the truth either.
The picture above, from the extraordinary blog Sprol,
is a Google satellite image of the truth, in America and elsewhere in
the industrial, corporatist-owned West, that we never get to see. This
is 'home' for 120,000 California cows. If
you are sensitive about suffering, please skip over the accompanying
well-researched text from the Sprol post that follows -- it will upset
you and possibly make you ill. If you're made of sterner stuff, click on the link above and zoom in to see the detail, and then read on.
If you've ever driven between San
Francisco and Los Angeles, and you were in too much of a hurry to take
the coastal route, you've probably smelled this place before you saw
it. This is what 120,000 cattle look like from space. You don't need
any fancy chemistry lessons or to imagine deadly radiation or dioxins
slowly building up in your system here. One glance tells you that this
is pretty disgusting. It's what goes into these animals that's the
really gross part. This is the gigantic cattle feedlot in Coalinga,
California along Interstate 5. Aside from the state prison, it's the
largest employer in west Fresno County, employing 1,500 persons in the
feedlot, slaughterhouse, and fancy steakhouse. Vertical integration.
A feedlot is a confined area for controlled feeding of animals. This
one is the largest in California and has several characteristics that
are typical of the modern cattle feedlot in the United States. The
cattle here are bound for places like McDonald's, California Safeway
stores, and precooked pot roasts and TV dinners. Lock 'em in. Fatten
'em up.You'll note that there is no shade, shelter, or grass on the
ground.
Cattle are ruminants, meaning that they would primarily graze on grass.
Cattle in feedlots, however, are fed grain, and are often implanted
with a series of steroid hormone implants inserted under the skin
behind their ears. It makes them grow faster and can increase profit by $80 per steer. That this has the effect of poisioning the water, as well as every burger eater who snarfs one, is a fact that millions of dollars per year go to suppressing.
Cattle have four stomachs designed to process the
cellulose fibers in grasses. Grain mixed with garbage like chicken
feathers and bone meal really isn't what these beasts are supposed to
be eating. The food combined with regular doses of antibiotics cause
the cattle to put on so much weight that their internal organs fall out
and have to be stuffed back in by the ranch hands. No veterinary care
is provided. " I spent countless hours stuffing
25lb of cow back inside the animal and then sewing the wound, the whole
force of a 600lb heifer straining against me. " All
of those homones, antibiotics, and other garbage in the meat isn't very
good for people. It turns out that the hormones in the meat cause estrogen levels to rise in people who eat it. Even though the EU won't allow it, the USDA insists that the rise in hormone levels is safe.
Many
doctors maintain that things like elevated levels of oestradiol, a
powerful sex hormone, in your beef can cause all sorts of problems,
such as the increased levels of cancers in the prostate, breast, and
ovaries. Incidence of these diseases have been rising since the 1950s
as beef consumption, heart disease, and obesity have all skyrocketed.
There are about ten million dairy cattle (most of them
force fed massive doses of chemicals and automatically killed after 3-4
years when their artificially jacked-up milk production declines or
their udders rupture) and 40 million beef cattle (whose grotesque and
miserable 18-month
incarcerated lives are described in the paragraphs above). And don't
get me started on veal calves, the atrocities of the slaughterhouse
industry, or the horrific air and water pollution that feedlots and
factory farms produce.
This is what I meant when in yesterday's post I wrote that people don't
pay attention to what they don't want to think about or don't want to
know. The fact that we can subject this many animals to this much
suffering, right under our noses, says as much about human nature as it
does about the evils and amorality of corporatism. We crave and welcome
uncritically any reassurance that it's not that bad,
that conditions and the extent of cruelty are overstated by 'alarmists'
and 'environmental extremists', and that these animals are incapable of
suffering or emotion anyway.
A nation wired for everything except the truth.
If we were exposed to truths like this, and truths like what is
happening today in Darfur, and what is happening in our own
neighbourhoods where children and spouses are trapped and endlessly
victimized by heartless abusers, and if we were unable to turn our
heads away until we really paid attention,
it would all end tomorrow. But the price of bringing an end to
corporatism and extreme, chronic violence and the monstrous suffering
of this world could be our own sanity. We may be strong enough to pay
attention to the truths that Moyers talks about, the "corporate
leviathans that cheat, exploit, injure and poison us, trap us in
hopeless jobs, renege on our healthcare and default on our
pensions". But beyond that is another, even darker level of truth, one
that we could never handle, one that we dare not pay attention to.
It has been reported that many of the people who first came upon the
great horrors of human cruelty -- the Soviet Gulags, the Chinese
prisons, the German concentration camps, the killing fields of Cambodia
and Rwanda -- suffered trauma as profound and lasting as that suffered by the surviving victims.
So maybe the media are right not to pay too much attention to these
terrible stories. Maybe it's best that we not know. Things are the way
they are for a reason.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
