Another Way

choices and reality

There is currently a fly in the room that is driving me to the brink of insanity. The stop-and-start of its buzzing makes me feel like I’m tweaking out. The frenetic bouncing around the room has me loosing a grip on reality. I’m doing my best to ignore it, to sink into some state of focus. Even soft focus will do. But the moment I get a few words on the page, this tiny bastard decides to move around again and everything gets sent back to zero.

I hate killing any creature. Truly can’t stand it. I make exceptions for flies and mosquitos though. Usually I will yell “sorry” before squashing them into oblivion. And I mean it. I feel it in my guts to extinguish something with sentience. My justification is that flies only live 15-28 days anyway and mosquitos carry disease. It’s not the strongest case but it works for me.

It’s hard to say when this aversion started. I distinctly remember one time in high school when I thought surely there was a mouse in my bedroom only to discover it was a roach rustling about in a plastic bag on the floor. In the dead of night I got it into a cup and walked it down the stairs to usher it outside. For some reason on my way I checked underneath the cup to make sure he was still there and, in doing so, released the beast onto my face. The scream I scrammed will go down in the annals of history. And even still, I got him back in the cup and released him outside.

There’s something so disagreeable to my soul about the business of killing. It’s the byproduct of being an empath. It’s why for years I’ve been some form of vegan or vegetarian or flexitarian. It’s absurd to think that something must die in order for me to exist in the world. That just can’t be the case. There must be another way.

To be a meat eater in today’s world, which is to say most people, requires a certain amount of cognitive dissonance (and this is coming from someone who occasionally eats meat). We spend billions of dollars a year on our pets. We lavish them with treats and outfits and carriers and veterinary care and photoshoots and grooming and beds. Then we turn around and pay someone else to kill an animal we will never see, raised in conditions we don’t want to see, who likely has a similar intelligence and emotional capacity as our beloved pets, just to make hamburgers. The morality and ethics of eating meat can be debated all day. But I stand firm in the claim that cognitive dissonance is required to justify the killing of one type of animal while arbitrarily protecting and revering another type.

There was another mass shooting this week. This time in Maine. As of right now they’re saying 18 people were killed. 18 people who get no future because a man had a gun. I would like to say I’m heartbroken and gutted but that would be a lie. One can only be heartbroken so many times before the heart just stops putting itself back together again. It’s more accurate to say that I’m numb. Anger is perhaps the closest emotion I can reach but even that seems distant. Everything I should be feeling - the grief, the heartache, the sorrow, the agony, the fear - has been flattened out by year after year of mass shootings.

To be a citizen of this country requires cognitive dissonance. When we declared independence from England we stated, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But all men are not created equal. Men with guns have more rights than everyone else. They have more rights than old people in a grocery store, than worshippers in a church, than kids in a school, than folks in a bowling alley. In America your right to life actually is alienable - by way of the NRA, by way of spineless lawmakers, by way of lobbyists, and by way of men with guns. We do not live according to what we believe.

The thing that drives me absolutely insane is that it doesn’t have to be like this. Living like this, with the ever-present threat of losing your life to a bullet, is a choice. As a nation we have decided that power and money mean more than our supposed principles, than our very lives. We have decided that the right to kill supersedes the right to live. It is the bed we made. It isn’t nature or intrinsic or pre-ordained. It’s decisions. It’s a reality built by things people have done (or haven’t done).

This should be both maddening and heartening. Because this reality, one riddled with laws that privilege civilians who wish to carry weapons of war at the expense of every living human around them, is a series of choices. That means we can choose something else. There is an America out there that doesn’t have these problems. We just haven’t made the choices that point us in that direction. But it is possible. It must be.

“Just open the window,” my sister said just now. Once again I was prowling the room on the hunt for that demon fly, my personal tormentor and destroyer of concentration. I heard her words, took a beat, and opened the window. Instead of smashing him into oblivion in a paper towel, I found another way. He got one whiff of fresh air and headed straight toward freedom. No squishing necessary.

And just like that I made a different choice. I chose to act according to the things I believe. I made a decision, however small, that helped to create the world I actually want to see around me. It’s possible. It can be done. And if it’s possible for an individual then why not a community? A state? A nation? The generous thing about this life is that every time we eat, every time we vote, every time we protest, every time we act, every time we encounter a fly, we are given a tiny opportunity to shape the world. We are given a chance to ask - is there another way?