[Nat]

A few years back, I might have said very similar things to what Sachita has posted here. Honestly I had a lot more sympathy for animals than I did for a single human being. I had this idea that animals were defenseless and that humans were brutal toward them and unless there were people willing to stand up for animal rights, then there was no hope against senseless human-caused misery, death and extinction among animals. I still feel a bit of that in my innermost core, though my feelings have changed to accept that nature is brutal and people are part of nature.

At some point, I stopped crossing humans off the list when it came to "beings that matter" in my own heart and mind. I think it happened around the time I decided that I mattered - maybe about 8 years ago. I think it was the week when I realized that my vegetarian diet had left me so weak that I could no longer pick up cinder blocks and both my knees were always in pain. Or maybe it was the week after, when I ate meat again for the first time in a year and a half (?).

During my vegetarian years, I went to a lecture by Carol J Adams called "The Sexual Politics of Meat" which really emphasized how women and animals are equated in our culture. She gave lots of examples which can still be found on her website. I do believe she touched once or twice on the intersection of race, women and animals within advertising, but she didn't go into great depth.

Anyway, not sure where I'm going with this, so I am going to make a jump into my present. I understand now that "not seeing race" in an issue where many others do is most likely an act of willful ignorance on my part. I am allowed to participate in this type of ignorance because it is supported by the majority (white) culture. To acknowledge the race issues here would be to "commit a crime against the collective." To acknowledge that most of our hands are bloody when it comes to animal cruelty is another one of those crimes. When I say, "Crime against the collective," I mean in this sense:

"Any step in individuation is experienced as a crime against the collective because it challenges the individual's identification with some representative of the collective - whether it be a family, party, church or nation. At the same time, each step - since it is truly an inflated act - is not only accompanied by guilt but also runs the very real risk that one will get caught in an inflation that carries the consequences of a fall."

- Edward F Edinger

I heard this quote in the Jungian podcast yesterday during a discussion of what happened in Nazi Germany among the relatively well-educated German citizens that ended up supporting the Nazi movement. It's very dangerous to take advantage of the ignorance afforded us by our individual sets of privilege, because it allows us to be mindless and therefore oppressive toward others. It's hard to break the spoken or unspoken rules of the collective, but I think it's worth it.