When it comes down to the thick of it all, you know what really matters? Life, and the quality of it. Nothing more, nothing less. I don't believe in religion so I don't believe there's anything else afterwards. Heaven and hell is ridiculous. If there was something, it's reincarnation or some form of disintegration of charged molecules that simply go somewhere else. Basic chemistry and biology. Thermodynamics, string theory, particulate matter, etc.
So with that in mind, I don't argue for too many things. The things that I do argue for are for those basic things: Life and the time we have here. My political charge is making sure that everyone is entitled to that liberty. I live by a code of three very broad and open ethical standards: Respect, compassion, and equality. All three are extremely interrelated and pretty much inseparable. I used to spend a lot of time getting in people's faces about my opinions. Mostly just to have an argument and to be difficult. I don't entertain myself that way anymore. About the only time I argue my opinion is when people make a point to say that others are not entitled to the same basic rights as themselves. I try to build my lifestyle choices around those three ethics, and I work very hard at adjusting my attitude and behavior to ensure that I am not a hypocrite. So with that, here goes:
We think as humans, we're civilized and conscientious animals. Supposedly, it's what distinguishes us from the rest of those other living things. That assumption obviously is also based on whatever religious protocol that our culture has been built around, ie. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, etc. But we're not. Far from it.
I have a simple argument. Maybe it will be ruled as some sort of fallacy. I don't know. It's just a theory, and it's not my own by any means, but I'm walking hand in hand with it at the moment. If you want to get rid of violence from this world, to become truly "civilized", you need to eliminate those sources from violence stems. You can eliminate violence by eliminating the need for violence, as in the case of terrorism or barbarism. If people don't need to prove a point, to come out from beneath oppression, or because they have their basic needs fulfilled, I don't imagine they have reason to maim, torture, and kill. If everyone were happy, why would that occur?
So here's the question. At what point is it okay to inflict violence? At what point is it okay to oppress or demean a populace? Is it ever justifiable to bend the rules that we originally set for ourselves? Most of us can agree on basic human rights. But our country at the moment is trying to find some common ground on whether it's okay to torture terror suspects in Guantanamo. Throwing out the other factors like the brash politics, the research showing torture doesn't conclude to correct information, or the implication that torture further adds fuel to the terrorism fire, let's just ask ourselves of the morality. This country is also trying to determine whether certain minorities should have rights while others don't. There's fallacies everywhere you look, and if's, and's, or's, and but's are in every political comment, but one thing remains, you can't find a solid line between good or bad, right or wrong, black or white. Things are just never that simple.
But what if we could try to make it that simple? If you can't distinguish between what is okay to inflict violence against, then you have a problem. Thin lines get crossed, they get erased, or redrawn. So if you want to get rid of the thin lines, to completely get rid of lines, you need approach the problem using the basic morals and apply them broadly. If we assume that morals are the basis for our being civilized, we should not form lines in which those morals should be applied except that when our basic needs are violated: life and the quality of life. For me, it's respect, compassion, and equality. I apply that to everything, it doesn't stop with other humans, it goes further, to animals, to living things, to ecosystems, to everything in general. If I am to live an honest a morally responsible life, I respect, show compassion for, and try to bring myself as an equal to everything.
So here we are, the place where people begin to pull away, to begin closing their minds. Most people can agree to believe in all those obscure ideas like respect but not all people are willing to put respect before themselves. In the developed world, with technology and alternatives, we no longer need disrespect to live our lives in quality. We just continue to no want change.
Think about it. I'm a vegetarian for a lot of reasons but most recently, the one that seems to make more sense, though difficult to explain, is that if violence against animals is okay, then why not human beings, to the environment, to ourselves? In the states, it's okay to eat cows and chickens and pigs, but not cats and dogs and horses. In Europe, they eat horse meat. In Hindu, it's unacceptable to eat cows. The Muslims view pork as dirty and sinful. The Chinese skin dogs and put them on fur coats. Africans eat primates, animals that are 98% similar to us genetically. The New Guineans have a brain disease caused by eating human brains. Americans like to see themselves as morally superior but what's the difference? What gives? Thin lines between what animals are okay to kill and which ones aren't, based on your culture or religion, probably means you're going to find too many people who can cross the line because they didn't know it was there or they just don't care.
The same goes for violence against other human beings. The thin line between whether it's okay to kill people who kill to teach them that killing is wrong (the death penalty), and people who think others deserve it (think Rwanda, Kosovo, the Holocaust, etc.). Why is genital mutilation in Africa is unacceptable but not torturing of war criminals in Iraq? Why is the continuing violence caused by the application of Agent Orange in Vietnam and other chemicals developed by American companies such as DOW and Monsanto gone almost entirely uncriticized, but chemical warfare used on the Kurds by Saddam in the 90s was internationally frowned upon and later punished? How could anyone seriously consider the claims of American democracy when we fund terrorism in South America through our anti-drug policies, paramilitaries, and funding of WHISC/SOA? These are hypocricies created by false standards, thin lines, and gray areas. And we created them ourselves. We live with them in our everyday lives.
Wait, did I mention that there is a direct correlation between the violence to animals and the violence to humans? Check out this website: http://www.americanhumane.org/about-us/newsroom/fact-sheets/understanding-the-link.html You might not realize that eating meat is violent. Or testing on animals for chemical products, or vivisection, or fur coats and leather is violence against animals. You might not think that burning rainforests, pouring concrete for parking lots, strip mines and power plants, or yes, eating meat, is violence against the environment. And most people certainly wouldn't translate that to violence against humanity and to ourselves. It's a personal view, a world view even, that it's okay to do those things. But as long as you can't firmly distinguish what is right and what is wrong... you're always going to have to make decisions on a point-by-point basis. And those decisions get made by everyone.
And the violence to ourselves... depression, anxiety, obesity, lifestyle-related diseases (cancer, heart disease, diabetes), insomnia, and so many other things that are being directly attributed to our own actions, and indirectly, like the chemicals in our environment that are changing our endocrine factors. I know so many people who are on some kind of medication just to keep up in this frantic rat race of life. How many women have been sexually assaulted, how many friends have inflicted injuries to themselves, how many children are stuck in front of a video game, how many men are taking Viagra? These are not healthy situations. They are the side-effects of a culture that is dying from the lack of oxygen. Our culture is victim of eating itself from within. Thin lines of trying to decide what is wrong and right and yet still keeping up with the Joneses, keeping up with Hollywood, and trying to tune out all the bad things that make us feel bad, without actually examing why and what is making us feel that way.
If you have thin lines, you're never going to stop anything based on the fragile and false standards that we set so we can tiptoe around them whenever we think they need not apply. You want to prevent violence in the world, to prevent the moral breakdown of our spirit, then as a society, we need to completely reexamine why the mistreatment and disrespect of one thing is okay while to another, it is not. Yes, it would require us to reexamine our lifestyle from the point of how we eat, to the way we build our cities, to the way we design our economies, to how we look at others and ourselves, to how we exist in the global collective, and so forth. But can you imagine the places we could go, the things we could see, the people we could be... it would truly be liberating. We just need to open our minds and our hearts.
