This "Freedom" Ain't Free, That's For Sure

You saw me there

you didn't care

that I was poisoning your tea;

it was the glare,

maybe my hair

that convinced you you are free.

Despite what the State Department tells me, it occurs to me that freedom is intrinsically free. It just depends on what you call freedom and who's responsible for making sure you've got it. McDonald's, iPhones, nose hair trimmers, Pepsi, chicken wings, NFL, Grand Theft Auto--is this freedom? That's what my culture tells me it is. We should be proud and lucky to have these things. We're privileged to have heart disease, cancer, eczema, suicide, child molesters, and no less than four school shootings a year. If this is freedom, then yes, that comes with a hefty price tag, one that we must pay for with all our military might and constantly defend. But is it all worth it? It seems to me that it's just good ol' ignorance that calls for an unending series of costs: a billion dollars here, a child's life there, another billion, a kidney, a heart, a soul.

Have you ever seen a commercial for lentils? Bear hugs? Meditation or yoga? Okay, maybe you've seen some yoga ads on your Facebook side bar, but the wisdom that underlies all of these things is already free and available to anyone who chooses to tap into them. They don't need a $3 million Superbowl ad to try to convince you to participate. But Wonderbread, sirloin steaks, the US Army, eyeglasses, vodka and Symbicort--these are things on which this culture is willing to spend trillions of dollars every year for the express purpose of making you needlessly dependent. Are these so-called trophies of freedom really setting you free?

A system that conditions us to believe that we must kill others, strip them of their resources, culture, and connection to the Divine just so it can turn around and sell us the idea that we are living freely is not a free system at all. We are compliant slaves in it, because the cost of our "freedom" is the blood of others. Did we not all learn the Golden Rule as kids? "Treat others as you want to be treated," "Putting others down to make yourself feel better is wrong!" While this society teaches kids nice concepts like that between the hours of 8am-3pm, it simultaneously sends the military and corporate bulldozers into every country on earth to simply take whatever it wants. I'd say cutting down the Amazonian rainforest--the lifeline to millions of tribespeople--so we can have Garfield notebooks is considerably worse than kids calling each other "doo-doo heads" on the playground.

"But they're savages, godless heathens that hate us and would kill us if we didn't stop them first!" is the theme I derive from this whole "Freedom ain't free" shit. All Arabs are religious zealots who want to see Christian America burn in the name of Allah. Tribal folk in Papua New Guinea don't want iPods, so they are of no use to us. They're simple, stupid, and ignorantly missing the train speeding through the 21st century, so fuck 'em. These are myths that have been planted in our collective psyche, myths that attempt to justify the system's flagrant use of cruelty and violence to get what it wants. Well--newsflash--Arabs don't hate freedom. Does it look like Egyptian Arabs are fundamentally opposed to human rights? Maybe they just hate western leaders coming into a culture that it frankly does not at all understand and paying off their own leaders in order to perpetuate the cycle of corruption and repression. It's quite simple: if the United States didn't directly FUND oppressive dictatorships, the oppressed people wouldn't hold contempt for the United States. Maybe they wouldn't be oppressed at all, and we could all act like humans again.

I want to be free. Oh yes, I love freedom. It's sweet. But I know true freedom doesn't come by paying allegiance and taxes to the very system that takes it from the rest of the world, processes it into a toxic pile of bullshit, and spoon-feeds it to me for a "very reasonable price." The freedom to buy cheap crap at Walmart, to drink Coca-Cola all day, to lose my teeth, my mind, my patriotic high school classmate, my compassion, my soul--that kind of freedom comes at a very steep price. And we are all paying it, all the time. But just as interest accumulates on a bank loan, we can't really pay it off until the bank simply crashes. We are automatically indebted, not just financially, but karmically, to all those whose blood has been shed for our fast food, morning coffee, iPhones, Toyotas, Crest toothpaste, and T-bone steaks.

You may be thinking, "but what about your freedom to be an obnoxious little bitch and speak your annoying radical mind? What about your right to come and go as you please, wear slutsuits and get an education? What about that??" And to that I say, you're right! I do have very important freedoms where many people, particularly women, in some parts of the world do not. But I also think that the only threat that faces me of losing these freedoms comes from this government itself. Does it get any worse than running into jungles rich in resources and killing all the indigenous peoples? Can it get worse than dropping bombs on Iraqi schools? In this country, gay people cannot exercise their human right to love and honor each other through marriage in more than 5 of the 51 states (if we're including Puerto Rico). Maybe it will one day tell me I can't gather in a group of five people or more. For my "safety," of course. I know what America is capable of; why should I believe it would never tell me I can't leave my house after 6pm?

Now, on the other hand, I love my morning coffee. I love my iPhone and computer from China. I (kind of) love my Ford Focus, and I love that I went to college for two years before realizing I was a debt slave and subsequently running away from it. But freedoms? I don't know. I think sometimes enslavement feels reeeeaallllyyy good, but we have to be aware that it is enslavement nonetheless. Because I have felt free. I am learning what that means and trying to recognize it more and more, but I know it doesn't feel anything like owing $30,000 to Citibank, getting cancer from a lifetime of processed food, or reading about Chinese sweatshop workers committing suicide in droves. The kind of freedom I am trying to cultivate...well, it's blood-free. It's fat-free. It's just plain free.

That Is Sooo Not Kosher, Dude

I never really thought about "kosher" meat or slaughter. Mostly because I didn't know what actually constituted a kosher food, and I figured since it's Jewish, it doesn't really have anything to do with me anyway. But it occurs to me that the kosher food industry is a huge one, and that's clear if you check just about any box or bag in your cupboard. See the little K or U inside a circle? That's been deemed kosher, which means it is essentially "inspected" by a rabbi and subsequently taxed to benefit one of several Jewish organizations. Kosher meat, on the other hand, carries a whole host of other prerequisites. Just as the demand for All Things Kosher rises, so too does kosher meat. But since the animals consumed by not only kosher Jews but every other meat-eater in the western world do not subscribe to any anthropocentric religion, and we are all made up of the same life force, I figured I should start giving a shit about these practices. What deems a cow "fit" to be eaten by kosher eaters, Jews and Gentiles alike?

I knew the meat was to be handled, processed, and produced in accordance with Jewish law, but I didn't know what this law was. I assumed it was to be blessed by some esteemed rabbi and hopefully treated with a little more respect than the poor beings in today's non-kosher factory farms; as it turns out, the concept of "more respect" and any fantasies of "humane treatment" were really just unconscious euphemisms I'd created and complied with in my mind. There are very vague standards set up for the humane treatment of farm animals, kosher or not, because the USDA's Animal Welfare Act does not even consider animals used for food to be animals at all. Check it out at: http://www.aphis.usda.gov/animal_welfare/downloads/awa/awa.pdf

The Torah, however, does have some guidelines. To the kosher Jew, only mammals with cloven hooves that "chew their cud" and birds that are not birds of prey may be eaten. This means cows, deer, goats, chickens, turkeys, etc. That lucky, unclean pig! Now here's where it gets tricky. The rules that govern kosher slaughter seem well-intentioned, which they probably were and/or are in small communities where animals are still killed with respect and gratitude. But respect, gratitude, and killing one animal a day simply do not pay the bills in Big Agribusiness. Somehow they must compensate for the inefficiency of costly ritual. What this means is that even though modern day practices evolve, the rules of the Torah do not, thereby mutating the "ritual slaughter" from one of reverence and holiness into one which creates loopholes for spiritless cruelty and heartless murder. Instead of God and Spirit, the driving force behind the booming kosher industry is now dollar signs, and the biblical guidelines they must adhere to are now nothing more than empty words. Oh irony!

There are several minor rules to be observed or not, but the major ones go as follows:

1. The slaughterer must be a shochet, a fully licensed and trained religious Jew. (This must be where we get the silly idea about a rabbi blessing the food.) Considering the entire Jewish population of the US still lingers around 2%, this guideline makes me wonder how many religious Jewish men there are to go around who are willing to become murderers in the corporate slaughterhouse, one of the most dangerous workplaces in the world.

2. The animal must be healthy. I honestly don't know how well this one works out, considering animals raised for kosher meat are kept in the same disgusting factory farm conditions as non-kosher animals. Kosher is not to be confused with organic, grass-fed, free range, or healthy. The kosher label has only to do with the slaughter itself and nothing to do with the conditions in which the animals are kept pre-slaughter. According to factory farm statistics gathered over the last 30 years, it's evident that around 90% of all marketable chickens have leukosis (chicken cancer) at the time of slaughter. Delicious! Similarly, about 89% of all beef patties in the US are tainted with E. Coli (yeah, from the thousands upon thousands of pounds of untreated cow shit that remains on the animals when they're sliced and diced). All the animals are pumped with a lovely cocktail of antibiotics, hormones, and steroids, not to mention fed with a super-fattening diet of cheaply-produced grain mixed with sawdust, feathers, newspaper, sewage, grease, poultry litter, cement dust, and ammonia (Diet for a New America, 1987). Yummy. These inedible products become "marketable flesh," which in turn become your own flesh. I'm just saying.

3. The animal must be fully conscious, "alive and moving" before slaughter. In short, the animals are not even granted the twisted amelioration of the stunning bolt gun that some other non-kosher animals are, which renders them unconscious before their bodies are ripped to shreds on the factory line. I can see how this would be fitting on a small farm where spirited Jews are slitting the throat of a likewise spirited goat that they've blessed and loved its entire life. But in a multimillion-dollar slaughterhouse, this refusal to stun the animal out of its unconscionable misery before it is strung up by its hindquarters just delivers an extra dose of sadism.

4. The animal must not fall into the blood of a previously slaughtered animal. I'm a little foggy on this one, but it seems that any accumulation of blood is considered representative of "idol worship," which is a no-no. Therefore, the animal cannot simply be killed in comfort on its side, writhing in an already unprecedented amount of pain. It must be strung up by inserting hooks into its broken hips and wait, sometimes for an agonizing five minutes on the assembly line, for its turn to be murdered.

5. Animals may not be slaughtered in front of each other, especially their young. Well, this is just boldly ignored. Sorry, that shit don't pay.

6. No blood of the animal may be consumed. The best way to drain an animal is to hang it upside down. Gravity. Cool. Check. That's not all though, because in order for certain parts of the creature to be eaten, the veins, arteries, and other such stringy blood-carrying matter must be removed. Unfortunately for the meat producers, this is a costly procedure. Fortunately for the meat producers, they are clever penny pinchers! (Is it in bad taste to make a Jewish joke here? I already have a sour taste in my mouth from all this throat-slitting talk. Okay, I won't, but you are all thinking it. Of course, to be fair, not all meat producers are Jews, just equally good businessmen.) To compensate for the silly expenditure, they only remove the arteries from the parts that are relatively cheap to do so. As for the rest of the meat, they sell it as non-kosher. So even though the animal was slaughtered in this ironic and even more cruel way in the name of good faith, it is marketed as non-kosher because to follow through with the whole ritual is just not good business. Remember: in this society, good business=bad ethics. Good little capitalists.

7. The throat must be slit with one deep, quick, horizontal cut. I suppose this was meant to inflict as little pain as possible. God's been good that way (??). But if you look up kosher slaughters on YouTube (one of which I have provided for you already), you will see that the cow in question is still very much alive, conscious, and evidently in a great deal of pain after having its trachea and esophagus slashed. Stupid cow, you're supposed to be dead! God said so!

To be fair, this particular footage has gotten a huge amount of notoriety in the international community and has been deplored by slaughterhouse experts and rabbis alike. This is NOT what kosher slaughter is supposed to look like. But how do we really regulate this sort of thing? Since kosher beef runs about three times as much as non-kosher beef, it stands to reason that this is a good business (remember: good business=lots of money=bad ethics), and it will keep going. But how do we merge divine grace with Big Business? How do we make sure these big kosher moneymakers are kept humble and present with God's will? Well we can't, as of now, considering kosher meat is even less regulated than its conventional counterpart. The USDA's lax regulations on livestock treatment are completely ignored by kosher slaughterhouses simply because the only actual regulation in existence for conventional livestock is applied only to the slaughter itself, the stunning bolt gun (which is prohibited by kosher standards), and no concessions are made for the despicable containment of the living animals pre-slaughter, as I mentioned earlier.

So why do kosher Jews follow these dietary laws anyway? Well, according to the author on jewfaq.org, it is because the Torah says so. Plain and simple. There are not necessarily any known health benefits to a kosher diet, but rather God wants it this way, so we do it this way. There is actually a whole system of Jewish laws, the chukkim, that apparently exist for no known reason. The devout follow the laws to show obedience to God even when they do not know why. Now I do not purport to believe that humans as we now manifest know everything--far from it--and there are many things that happen regardless of our ignorance to the larger cosmic logic (sweet band name?) behind them. But I strongly believe that in order for anything to be of any use spiritually, it must exist within our hearts. We must know that the actions we carry out are truly serving the Spirit, that which permeates throughout all of us. Otherwise, where are our energies going? We must believe that what we are doing does have a purpose and hold that intention in our prayers. If It is not in your heart, then where is God? Certainly not on your plate.

Extricate yourself from denial. Be aware! I know it's not so pleasant, and denial is a fine place to be, but it's the comfortable process of denial and misinformation that allows these atrocities to go on. Educate yourself and others and demand this system reflect our true needs!

"If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities." --Voltaire