On July 3rd, the VA was looking for volunteers to accompany the students at the WBRC to a Fourth of July presentation at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View. Since I had no excuse not to help out, I signed on for duty. It turned out to be a bit more intimidating than any of the previous outings I had gone on. Even when it is just me, I have a bit of a phobia when it comes to crowds. I really don't like them very much because it feels like I am trapped by walls of people.
I often reflect on how weird it is that I didn't experience any claustrophobia on the submarine, but when it comes to crowds, I get really anxious. I think it stems back to my experience in London on July 28th, 1981. My dad had taken me to London for the Royal Fireworks the day before the big Royal Wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Dianna (At the time). I only have three distinct memories of that night. The first was being disappointed by the fireworks. Maybe I had been spoiled in the US by the Fourth of July fireworks of my childhood years, but these were definitely not up to par. For such a grand affair, this was a bit of a disappointment. I knew from my time in British schools, that the Fourth of July wasn't celebrated here, for some reason, so I guess they had no frame of reference for how to really put on a show. The second memory was the spectacle behind us. We were toward the back near a copse of trees. It seemed that every five minutes there were be a scream, a breaking of branches, and a loud thud. After the first couple iterations of this, it became clear that a group of "Royal" hooligans were a bit too drunk, a bit too inexperienced with climbing trees, and a tad unbalanced, in more ways than one. It made for an amusing experience, and was by far the highlight of the night up to this point.
You may be wondering where I am going with this, or why I have chosen to interject this story into the mix. That thought is a good prelude to memory number three. After the fireworks were done, the roughly five hundred thousand people in attendance in Hyde Park started to disperse. As this huge crowd flooded the streets of London with a mix of the high class and the uncouth, it became clear that we would all have one thing in common. We wouldn't be taking the underground, or "tube", home that night. That became clear when we learned that it had been shut down for the night, along with all other forms of public transportation. All of these people were pouring into the streets and there was no way of draining them out. It was a pretty intense experience for me at that age and I remember being terrified by the whole thing. Since I always like to try to figure out fears or behavior, particularly my own, I am pretty sure that this is where my fear of crowds came from. And I was feeling it again tonight, that's for sure. The big difference is that I was responsible for someone else this time, like my dad had been responsible for me on that night so long ago.
Once we had found our seats and gotten situated, I was able to find some peace and calm in the distractions from the stage. It was a pretty bible-thumping, mainly white crowd, about the polar opposite of the folks I had spent time with in Ohio or in San Francisco the previous weekend. The evening's events were put on by a local church, and they did a pretty good job of it, with a couple of exceptions. The first was during a sketch celebrating Americana through a series of TV themes. During the "Bonanza" sketch, I saw the only two African-American performers of the night, in the role of cattle rustlers, or horse thieves (I honestly couldn't tell which). This left me to ponder which of two mind-sets had culminated in this. Was it intentional, a tongue-in-cheek shot at stereotypes? Or was there an ignorance of how this could be perceived by the crowd? Maybe the church was oblivious to this apparent message. And then there was the chance that the rest of the crowd was also oblivious and that I was just being too sensitive. In either case, it felt a little uncomfortable.
The second, and much more disturbing exception was the sing-along of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm", replete with people in farm animal costumes running through the crowd. This felt like a propaganda exercise being pumped out across probably five or six thousand people. What they failed to mention was Old MacDonald's crimes. There weren't any verses that said:
"Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O,
And on that farm he raped some cows, E-I-E-I-O,
With an anal probe here, and forced insemination there,
Here some pain, there some pain, everywhere some pain, pain.
Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O.
Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O,
And on that farm he kidnapped calves, E-I-E-I-O,
With a mother's cry here, and a baby's cry there,
Here some pain, there some pain, everywhere some pain-pain.
Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O.
Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O,
And on that farm he murdered animals, E-I-E-I-O,
With callousness here, and brutality there,
Here a murder, there a murder, each of them a callous murder.
Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O."
I guess that would have been a real bummer to people. I seriously doubt that this was an intentional scheme to brainwash the folks in attendance, but that doesn't change the fact that this is how our misconceptions are formed. These little ditties are why people like me grew up thinking that the farm was a bucolic place, filled with happy animals that lived good long lives. The reality couldn't be further from truth. Most people probably think, like I did, that the dairy cows just naturally were in a perpetual state of lactation. The reality is that they have to be continually maintained in gestation to provide milk. This is a brutal affair which starts with the cow being anally violated in order to position the uterus to receive the artificial insemination device. The fact that this operation is performed while the poor cow is restrained in a "rape rack" speaks volumes both to the act and the callous cruelty involved. You may ask why the cows can't just do it the old fashioned way, the natural way. Well, the natural way doesn't involve cows having as many babies as the dairy system requires them to. To be impregnated that often the "natural way" would risk injury due to the repeated mountings from a much larger bull, so the "farmers" found a more efficient way to protect their "property". After nine months, the new born calf is not greeted with its mother's love. Instead it is forcibly stolen from her in order to avoid wasting any of the mother's milk on its intended purpose. That would mean less that could be sold, and that is what the dairy industry really cares about. The mother's and baby's woeful moos fall on deaf ears on Old MacDonald's farm. After years of this indignity, there is no retirement home for these traumatized cows. Their fate is the same as the rest of the animals on the farm. They will die in a cruel way that punctuates a life of being a thing, rendered devoid of feelings by the industry and a culture that would find it inconvenient to acknowledge their existence. Now that I do know better, it is hard to see these as anything other than rallies to continuing ignorance.
Needless to say, I did not join in the chorus.
