vegetarianism

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Wed Jun 27 10:41:18 PDT 2001


Vegetarianism attracts the most surprising promoters. This week's NY Press contains an interview by Andre Slivka with Bernie Goetz, the famed subway shooter, who's now running for mayor (but if he won, he'd let Rudy run the city). An excerpt (the full story is at <http://www.nypress.com/14/26/news&columns/feature.cfm>):


>Goetz bends his head to the side, and a feline self-satisfaction
>plays across his face.
>
>"For hundreds of millions of years - for billions of years on this
>planet - all creatures were either hunters or prey... Not only were
>you hunter or prey, but even if you were one of the hunters, even
>then you lived in fear of being prey. People can break away from
>that cycle, because we're the top animal on the planet... We do our
>killing today in the supermarket, we do it while sitting in a
>restaurant. When you sit there and order anything-chicken or fish or
>steak or anything-you have the power of life and death over an
>animal. You don't have to kill it anymore with your bare hands, or
>with a weapon. You kill with the power of your money.
>
>"I don't have a problem with food anymore," he observes. "...[Y]es,
>I think that eating less meat, or more vegetarianism, is very
>important to helping advance civilization. In fact, I personally
>think if people would stop eating meat it would solve - and I know
>this is going to sound outrageous to a lot of people - but I think
>it would solve, just to give a rough figure, a third of the problems
>on the planet...
>
>"We all know what we do," he almost whispers. "Whether at night in
>our dreams or when we're conscious, but we know. And for me
>personally - a rather funny thing - prior to becoming a vegetarian,
>when I was looking into a mirror, I couldn't look into my eyes for
>any period of time, and now I have no problem doing that. You know
>what you are. People tend to know what goes on."



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