Calling all Trolls … (01/23/14)
“To truly live is to war with trolls.” ~ Henrik Ibsen
Yesterday, during a rather intense online chat about the myths meat-eaters use to justify treating animals as mere commodities vs. the merits of living as a vegan (i.e. seeing animals as equally worthy sentient beings), it finally happened: I was called — among other names too surly to mention here — a “Troll”.
Now, when it first happened, I was more than a bit taken aback. After all, I had learned that a “Troll” was a negative label, describing someone who makes comments in chat-rooms & blog-threads & Facebook posts that are purposefully designed to insult or offend. Of course, I knew that I wasn’t doing this at all; I knew that I was simply trying my best to calmly illuminate the oft-ignored facts surrounding an oft-ignored modern-day Holocaust … And shortly after exiting the conversation, I realized the delicious irony of the situation: that a meat-eater calling a vegan a “Troll” for standing up for the rights of enslaved and oppressed animals is kind of like a white bigot calling Martin Luther King a racist for telling him to treat blacks with Respect & Dignity.
For lack of a better term, the insults that were thrown at me were nothing short of ridiculous, and I went to bed with a smile on my face — with heartfelt Empathy & Compassion for the pained man who had attempted to insult me, of course, and yet with a gentle smile on my face nonetheless.
And then this morning I awoke with a different thought — a thought that started to make last night’s encounter profound and Meaning-full … Essentially I awoke to the realization that what we might need more than anything else at this time of teetering — that what we might need more than anything else at this time when everything beautiful and everything ultimately worthwhile hangs in the balance; when humanity’s very long-term existence hangs by a thread — that what we might very well need right now … is MORE TROLLS!
Not the “trolls” that exist merely to antagonize and manipulate and insult and lambast, mind you. We most certainly already have far more than enough of those denizens of discord in our lives.
No, what we truly need now are people with the integrity to reflect another aspect of Trolls — namely, the courage to speak out about things that matter; the courage to not only discuss matters of injury & injustice with friends & family, but to do so openly and overtly with those actually doing the perpetrating; the courage to meet the enemy on his or her own turf and … respectfully-yet-resolutely … stand up for what is Right.
*We need more Trolls to publicly stand up for soldiers sent to fight unjust wars to fill the pockets of politicians and power-brokers …
*We need more Trolls to publicly stand up for the homeless and the poor who still fill our city streets …
*We need more Trolls to publicly stand up for members of other religions who are damned or condemned or ridiculed by members of our own …
*We need more Trolls to publicly stand up for the tens of thousands of innocent men & women who have been wrongfully accused of “crimes” that are not really crimes, or who have been wrongfully convicted of crimes they did not commit …
*And we need more Trolls to publicly stand up for the animals — those that are cruelly enslaved in circuses, those that are callously imprisoned in zoos, those that are being brutally hunted on the high seas, those that are repulsively abused in dairy farms, and those that are being coldly murdered every minute of every day in our slaughterhouses.
There are literally dozens of tragedies of injustice & immorality happening all around you every day, my Friends — and what the victims of these tragedies do NOT need is your pity or your sympathy or your “informed interest” or your “emotional allegiance”.
No, what the oppressed and the abused and the manipulated and the downtrodden of your very own community need more than anything else is your ACTION …
What they need is a champion.
What they need a hero.
What they need … is a TROLL.
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