The crazies are always with us. They stained the clean parchment of a new year early in its first month. In Canada, unarmed extremists in skimpy bathing suits braved the frigid streets of Saskatoon to tell all who would listen that it is immoral to eat meat. The ladies were eye candy. Had I been there, I would have ogled them until frost bit my nose, but I would never have accepted their message.
Some of the animal rights extremists seem to believe non-human creatures were all created by Walt Disney. This is blasphemy. According to the Christian Bible, God did it. Although it doesn?t say anything about it in the Ten Commandments, God also ordained that creatures would eat other creatures. From the very beginning, predation has been an essential process in the Web of Life. Man is the ultimate predator, able to kill any visible creature and, unfortunately, able to disarrange the balance of nature by eliminating whole species. At the last, many human beings themselves become the prey of invisible organisms. This is why society has health care providers and facilities, pharmaceuticals and never-ending disputes over the ways in which health care should be provided.
Every organism that eats another organism does so in order to survive long enough to perpetuate its species. There are places in the world where food plants can?t be grown. In those places, human beings, unless they can obtain food from elsewhere and can afford to pay for it, must try to subsist on whatever life forms they can find. They have no other choice. PETA wants us all of us who have choices to choose to be vegans. If we were all to yield to the blandishments of the almost bare beauties turning blue in the January cold, what would be done with all the livestock which, over centuries, have been domesticated and diversified by selective breeding? If we can?t use them as a source of food, they have no economic value. If we can?t kill them to control their numbers, they become a plague. This makes no sense.
The PETA strippers can be dismissed as silly women who subscribe to an extremist philosophy. The man with the automatic weapon in Tucson Arizona who attempted to kill a congresswoman and who did kill or wound others can be described only as a merciless murderer. The account of the vicious attack will be entered in the history books as a non-political act by a deranged killer. This may be true. The only political consequence of the violent episode is to delay the congressional debate on the proposed repeal of what has been called Obama Care.
On our side of the border, smug Canadians decry a political system in which bearing weapons is a constitutional right and in which government has been unable to produce the kind of universal medicare system which has long been in place in every other advanced nation in the world. We can sneer at the influence of the Tea Party people in American politics. We can dismiss them and their retreaded beauty queen idol as political illiterates who never change their intellectual underwear. We can be suspicious of the fact that most high-level assassinations in the United States are said to be the work of psychotic loners. We can boast that, aside from the judicial killing of Louis Riel, there have been only two political assassinations in Canada - Thomas Darcy McGee in 1868 and Pierre Laporte in 1970. We can make a long list of reasons for believing we are a far more civilized race than our American cousins. We shouldn?t.
We are going backwards. While gun control laws are weakened, other laws are being made more strict, with more people (mostly aboriginal) going to prison and more prisons being built to hold them. As the wealth increases, we see an ever greater proportion of it being pre-empted by those who are already wealthy. We are creating economic inequities. Economic injustice leads to violence. What is happening south of the border could happen here.
