After reading through the comments, I think it's important to remember that the systemic forces causing us to squeeze the life from each other and our world have not changed an iota since wealth and power first started keeping slaves in pens, thousands of years ago.
What has changed in America since I was a child is the total abdication of the liberal class and its institutions. The purpose of a privileged liberal class is to prevent capitalism from fulfilling its goal of consuming everyone and everything it depends on for life. Destroying the consumer class is not exactly a smart feature of the consumerism system, yet reviewing the past forty years shows that happening quite clearly, from the bottom up. This is because liberals and their institutions have been bought and co-opted into the Commodify Everything creed that is currently hurtling toward train wreck with the throttle wide open and no brake.
I mention this only to point out that there is no good reason to mock or curse pigs for being pigs. Appreciate them for what they are, understand their behaviors, and you may corral them in time. Neither is there any good reason to complain that the pig-keepers have turned the pigs loose to destroy the farm, and now defend their depredations, or at best wring their hands over the inevitability of it all. Pity them for being such slaves to their own short-sighted self interest, no better in effect than the pigs themselves, and maybe you will see how best to change a mind and heart or two.
I love this. The only part that hurts is equating pigs to man. Poor pigs. They are smart and abused by our factory farms yet still get used as examples of the most wretched creatures on Earth, the Americans and our minions.
You are right about pigs being basically fine critters. I met and was acquainted with several individual animals in my boyhood and youth, and have worked around them in large groups on farms as well. They are smart and endearing and can be terribly dangerous. They will eat until it kills them if allowed, and trample their own offspring in the rush to the trough. If the mood strikes, they will savage a keeper who has raised them from piglets. You will rightly suggest these traits are bred into them, and that their living conditions contribute greatly to such behaviors: those true things also make of pigs an excellent metaphor for domesticated humans like us.
I know. Moreover, we will always find a way to excuse our cruelty. The pigs behavior in captivity or out has absolutely no bearing on how we treat them, tho men like to say so. We can choose to do differently, we just don’t. Therefore no animal is a good metaphor for men.
After reading through the comments, I think it's important to remember that the systemic forces causing us to squeeze the life from each other and our world have not changed an iota since wealth and power first started keeping slaves in pens, thousands of years ago.
What has changed in America since I was a child is the total abdication of the liberal class and its institutions. The purpose of a privileged liberal class is to prevent capitalism from fulfilling its goal of consuming everyone and everything it depends on for life. Destroying the consumer class is not exactly a smart feature of the consumerism system, yet reviewing the past forty years shows that happening quite clearly, from the bottom up. This is because liberals and their institutions have been bought and co-opted into the Commodify Everything creed that is currently hurtling toward train wreck with the throttle wide open and no brake.
I mention this only to point out that there is no good reason to mock or curse pigs for being pigs. Appreciate them for what they are, understand their behaviors, and you may corral them in time. Neither is there any good reason to complain that the pig-keepers have turned the pigs loose to destroy the farm, and now defend their depredations, or at best wring their hands over the inevitability of it all. Pity them for being such slaves to their own short-sighted self interest, no better in effect than the pigs themselves, and maybe you will see how best to change a mind and heart or two.
I love this. The only part that hurts is equating pigs to man. Poor pigs. They are smart and abused by our factory farms yet still get used as examples of the most wretched creatures on Earth, the Americans and our minions.
You are right about pigs being basically fine critters. I met and was acquainted with several individual animals in my boyhood and youth, and have worked around them in large groups on farms as well. They are smart and endearing and can be terribly dangerous. They will eat until it kills them if allowed, and trample their own offspring in the rush to the trough. If the mood strikes, they will savage a keeper who has raised them from piglets. You will rightly suggest these traits are bred into them, and that their living conditions contribute greatly to such behaviors: those true things also make of pigs an excellent metaphor for domesticated humans like us.
I know. Moreover, we will always find a way to excuse our cruelty. The pigs behavior in captivity or out has absolutely no bearing on how we treat them, tho men like to say so. We can choose to do differently, we just don’t. Therefore no animal is a good metaphor for men.
There ya go mans’plaining again.
When the shoe fits…
Thanks for the reply. I don't quite see how your points relate to my comment, but they are fine points.