After my last wonderful visit to the Farm, I found myself having a minor case of the sniffles. At the first rest stop on the I-5, I pulled over to blow my nose. As I walked into the bathroom to get some toilet paper, something that I am sure we have all done from time to time, I experienced a moment of sheer revulsion. As I reached down to unspool an ample handful of “noise blowing receptacle”, I had a moment of clarity regarding what I was about to do. Before I go there, I am hoping that I am not the only person in the world who has done this before. If I am, this whole story is going nowhere and I will likely be ostracized for ever more as the person “who did that”. Anyway, back to my ugh moment. In the instant before my hand touched the sheet of paper sticking out from beneath the metal shroud, I thought of the hand that probably last touched that sheet. Some strange, and probably disgusting man (Who else would go number two in a roadside rest stop like this one), had pulled off the last sheet to hastily wipe the remnants of what had previously been the occupant of his colon. Given the meager ply of this paper, there is a good chance that it had not provided his hand with full sanitary protection before he had pulled this last sheet. There is no need for more visuals there, I am sure you get the picture. And this was the paper that I was previously planning to hold to my face while I blew my nose. Pretty gross, huh! For those who will admit to having done this before, I suspect that you will never do it again. The implications of the act are going to be too profoundly embedded in you conscious and subconscious.
Now, I don’t work for the Kleenex industry, although I am game if they are, so my story is not intended to help move the product off the shelves. The intent of my story is to ask why an anecdote like this can be very influential while people choose to ignore other disgusting aspects of life and proceed like its business as usual.
Witness for example, the following quote which I read on the wall of a popular Vegan restaurant that I frequent:
“For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds?... But for the sake of some little mouthful of flesh we deprive a soul of the sun and light, and of that proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy.”
This quote is attributed to Plutarch, a Greek historian, biographer, and essayist born in 46 CE. Maybe Plutarch is a bit too abstract and since you haven’t heard of him, his words do not resonate (Although why my grossly formatted words would if his don’t is a mystery to me). Let’s try something else on for size:
“Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds theirs. We live by the death of others: we are burial places! I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look on the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.”
Those words were uttered by a man who is revered as the pinnacle of wisdom, a certain Leonardo DaVinci. Why is it that what was so obvious to these men centuries ago continues to elude the majority of the world’s population. Has death and suffering become so engrained in us that we don’t even give it a second thought? Are we so selfish that it just doesn’t matter? Have we forgotten that all life is sacred and worthy of respect?
Believe it or not, we all have a choice to make when it comes to the disgusting things that we choose to say “no” to. The main difference between the toilet paper situation and the eating of animal corpses is that there is a decent chance that the toilet paper wasn’t contaminated with feces. Think about it.
