It's All the Same Thing

*This is an article that I was commissioned to write for a campus publication called The Zine, due out next month I believe. Have at!*
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“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
--Martin Luther King Jr.


It’s hard not to chuckle when I think about my life before going vegetarian: a lifetime decrying the sheer wickedness of racism; a good couple of years ardently campaigning for the equality of my homosexual brothers and sisters; months expending my time exposing the truth that all oppressions, prejudices and injustices were linked. ...All-the-while sustaining myself on the flesh of being not too different from myself, that deserved the same kind of consideration I had felt vital to everything else.

Why had it been so difficult for me to come to the realization that the same patterns of oppression that had barred people of my race from basic welfare and allowed men of my preference to be incarcerated, demonized and killed at whim also justified our literal objectification of the creatures with which we share our planet? Why? Why, when the same shackles that once bound my forefathers crammed to the point of suffocation on the Slave ships, now bind cows and pigs, crammed in their stalls? Why, when the same ideas of Africans being soulless and “not like us” used to justify, their abused, mutilation, rape and murder at a whim? Why, when on the same ground where Christian settlers decimated the Native tribes, and where noted local families ran plantations where once slaves were shackled, beaten and starved new factory farms have risen? It is sickening to think that once upon a time someone looked at another person as simply a brainless, soulless object only existence to serve his needs… the same way I once looked at that Thanksgiving turkey.

Similarly, my sexuality limits my capacity to escape oppression. And it’s not just in Nazi Germany, where we were corralled into the camps, where the glances that fell on those pink triangles were little different than those glaces that fall on animals in the slaughterhouse. It’s not just in modern day Jamaica, where the violent, relentless and brutal hunt to kill the homosexual is taken up with comparable relish as the animal hunt that many people engage in for leisure. It’s the fact that my sexuality codes me as Other and bars me from the same kind of humanity and on the day that I foreswore animal-eating, I saw that an animal’s non-humanness similarly coded barred it from mutual respect.

I cannot even try to think of the number of birds, calves and pigs—once caged, despair-laden and confused as to why they were born into such a cruel and merciless existence—that have made my stomach their final tomb without being sick with guilt. It’s probably close to the number of colored voting applicants turned away in the early 1960’s by the Racist working the registration desk, or the number of times the bigot yells “Fuckin’ Fags!” today at the gay couple walking past. I implore my reader to think about this the next time you raise that burger to your face: if you at any point are or could have been the victim of an oppressive system, how could you turn around and participate in another oppression?