Cecil — and All the rage … (07/29/15)
Most of you have heard the latest outrage: that a 13 year old lion named Cecil — the alpha male of a pride of lions (including up to 24 cubs, most of whom will now probably be killed by rival adult males) in Zimbabwe — was recently killed by a dentist from Minnesota. And you now what? As horrific as this deed was (trophy hunting is per se one of humanity’s most repulsively immoral acts), Cecil’s actual murder wasn’t what bothered me the most …
No, what really pissed me off — and what gets me riled up even this very minute — is all the high-&-mighty people calling for his head; all those pompous better-than-thous condemning him in public; all those arrogant how-dare-he’s demanding that the U.S. government extradite Walter Palmer to Zimbabwe to face trial; all those who are denigrating his person and calling him “the new face of evil”.
And what’s so bad about that? What’s so bad about them doing so? I’ll tell you what’s so bad about it — roughly 97% of the people doing that denigrating; roughly 97% of the people ranting & raving about the “obscene cruelty” that Walter Palmer inflicted on Cecil the lion, ARE COMMITTING FAR WORSE CRIMES EVERY DAY in their own lives.
That’s right … You heard me say it. If you aren’t vegan — if you eat steak or hamburger or bacon or pork chops or chicken wings or drumsticks or scrambled eggs or ice cream or any kind of cheese — then YOU are paying others to make animals just as sentient as Cecil suffer a FAR WORSE FATE than he did. And you are doing this every single time you go shopping and every single time you sit down to eat.
People make mistakes — we all do. And people will pay the price for those mistakes — we all do that as well. And some of us will even have the humility & the courage — like Walter Palmer did — to stand forth and admit we were wrong and ask for forgiveness. And yet the one thing we are NOT to do at any time is publicly condemn others for their sins while our own lives are rife with choices just as damaging and/or failings just as “evil”. To do so is blatantly hypocritical; to do so evinces a HYPOCRISY that makes the one doing the condemning actually twice as wicked as the one being condemned.
In essence then, my Friends, it is fine for you to be upset about Walter Palmer murdering Cecil — a majestic, sentient animal. It was and remains an egregious sin on his part; one I like to think he will never commit again … AND if you are not currently living a vegan life, then you have absolutely NO STANDING whatsoever to call him out for this particular failing. Indeed, as long as you persist in using your hard earned money to pay others to enslave & mutilate & murder adolescent animals, then the only person you have a right to condemn at all in your life — is yourself.
Peace … S
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