red fuzzy jesus

Veg Ethics

13 years ago today I inadvertently chose to have the same conversation roughly 1000 times, usually at meals. I didn’t mean to but I signed up to endlessly defend everything I eat and drink. 13 years ago I began a never-ending, frustrating process of explaining myself and still feeling misunderstood. This is all because on June 21, 1991 I decided to become a vegetarian.

I loved meat. When I was first trying to give it up my middle school was located right beside a Burger King and the smell of whoppers wafted through windows to torture my discipline. Today I’ve rediscovered my love for meat albeit through soy look-alikes which may or may not actually resemble the real thing. At some point I stopped evaluating food simply by taste and adopted preferences based on health, humanity, and harm to the environment. That summer I read books in the public library on how animals were raised, killed, shipped, bred, and sold and decided I didn’t want to be part of that system. After a couple months I came home one afternoon to inform my parents I would no longer be eating meat. Because I was not old enough to buy my own groceries I told them I would be content with peanut butter sandwiches till I was 18 if necessary. They resisted, even punished at first, but eventually relented. I wonder today if I would have that sort of resolve about anything.

To me, it was never about killing animals. I’ve always thought people who oppose the killing of animals to stop eating them go back to burgers pretty quickly. The idea of choosing whether or not to be part of a system is a bit more complex. To explain I usually use the analogy of pet stores. When I was growing up there were pet store chains with stores in almost every mall. Then, a lot of news reports came out about how poorly animals were treated and bred for pet stores. Most people don’t like the idea of puppy/kitty/bunny abuse so they looked to shelters and private breeders for pets. Many chains went out of business. It wasn’t that those people thought it immoral to own a pet, they just didn’t want to be part of that system so they took their business elsewhere. I don’t have an overriding moral objection to killing an animal and eating it. That seems to be the natural order of things. I just can’t justify playing a role in the current corporate farm model of the meat industry.

This idea of interconnectedness has bled into other areas of my adult life. I find the overall concept as frustrating to explain as its specific applications – like vegetarianism. This isn’t the result of some density on the part of the listener. It mainly stems from my own inability to rectify it in my mind. It’s also not all that prevalent in capitalist society and humankind is selfish by nature. The idea of seeing your individual choices in terms of how they affect greater goods like the environment or developing countries is highly ethical in one sense while esoteric, abstract, and impossible to apply consistently in another. It’s equally impossible to avoid hypocrisy. I can criticize people who drive gas-guzzling SUVs but insist on running the air conditioner non-stop. No cows were injected with hormones on behalf of my lunch today but I can guess some little Honduran girl worked very hard on the shirt I’m wearing.

My realist tendencies remind me that everything I choose has a near negligible effect on the systems I subvert. My conscience reminds me that I can’t take myself completely out of any system nor can I remove myself even partially from most systems with which I disagree. However, I still find value in notions of interconnectedness. So I don’t eat animals. I recycle bottles, read a lot of news from different sources, and vote. Who knows if this really does help some overall concept of cosmic order. I at least know the effort helps one individual system… me.

Thrifty Epiphanies

I learned a very valuable lesson this weekend; Mexican Americans love my clothes. I sold over 20 shirts and a bunch of other junk at a yard sale and my primary clientele were residents of the adjacent Hispanic neighborhood. The sale was a pain but it helped me out during a time when my belt is uncomfortably tight.

If you’ve been cognizant and near me in the past few months you’ve heard me whine about my mutual fund crashing and taking all my savings with it, the enormous down payment NYU requires to hold your spot, a hefty tax bill, medical expenses not covered by insurance, and a host of other thieving circumstances. I’ve accepted that things are going to be painfully frugal till I move to New York and tighter still once I’m a grad student. I’m fine. I’m going to be fine. And I realize I’m hardly alone in these worries. I have a good job and have stuck to a monthly budget since I graduated college but somehow I find myself frustrated in a lot of debt and a bit of trouble. What happened? Did life get the best of me? Did some intangible force rot the fruit of my labor?

These past two months have shaken a core belief of mine. I have always held that the condition of your life is a product of your choices. You make you. If you work hard and manage areas well you’ll excel but irresponsibility and laziness will leave you stagnant. Then I just kept getting hit, boom boom boom, leaving me to rethink my whole ‘good choices’ philosophy. Surely I am not responsible for the hurricane that blew through my bank account.

Never one for secrets, this weekend I revealed a shameful practice of mine. Sometimes, not all the time, I ride the metro for free. It’s usually a product of realizing too late I don’t have money on my scanning card and being too in a hurry to want to deal with it. So I scoot behind the person in front of me and slip in without paying. I know I shouldn’t do that. It sounds so stupid when I see it written as opposed to justified in my head. About a year ago the person behind me was a plain clothed metro cop who gave me a ticket for $10. I laughed off the ticket and honestly forgot all about it. Not paying the ticket lead to my license suspension. I didn’t know they could suspend your VA driver’s license for a metro violation in DC but apparently it happens. I received a notice of suspension with no violation specified so I paid parking tickets and my reinstatement fee in April. I thought I was copasetic till I got pulled over and charged with a misdemeanor. Now I face a hefty fine and the possibility of jail time because I didn’t keep up with a ticket from a minor metro offense. Conclusion: it was my irresponsibility that led to trouble after all. Being in a hurry, being lazy, forgetting a $10 fine grew on its own till it was big enough to knock me down.

Like forgetting a ticket it was my dense choice to put my money in a mutual fund that depended heavily on startups. I chose to defer NYU for a year so I guess the 8k holding fee is my fault too. I argued and argued for a higher salary so whose fault is it when April 15th nears and I blink in disbelief at what TurboTax is telling me? With stark reality my belief in personal responsibility is reaffirmed however painful it is to accept my failures. It’s easy to blame circumstance and forces beyond your control when you face challenges but overall we have more power to shape our lives than we tend to realize. If you can stomach brutal, personal honesty you can regain a sense of control. The blame alternative feels so good but stunts personal growth and dooms you to a repetition of error.

I am having financial difficulties because of the way I managed my life. Even though that admission is difficult to make, it clearly designates the source of the solution.

The Death Effect

In presidential election years, everything can be seen through the prism of how it affects the race. With Kerry and Bush so close, small changes and slight missteps can have a large effect on the polls. Nothing quells partisanship like a large, national ceremony so during such a time candidates tiptoe to compete but not capitalize. Reagan’s death presents a unique challenge for both campaigns and may be the type of election year event that widens a close race.

The most obvious affect so far is Kerry’s decision to stop campaigning for a week or two. Kerry knows that nothing he says or does will get adequate news coverage during the mourning period so he’s smart to save his money. He’s also smart to know that his rhetoric of late depicts the antithesis of a Reagan America and is likely to alienate swing voters with the contrast. While Kerry steps back into the shadows – emerging only to say something nice about the former President – Bush is everywhere. The death occurred during ceremonies honoring D-Day. The speeches Bush gives during these ceremonies honor veterans but they’re also carefully constructed campaign speeches used to drum up a general sense of patriotism and draw parallels between WWII and the war on terrorism. Normally these speeches wouldn’t get such extensive coverage but this week they were pushed on air a little more because of interest surrounding the President’s whereabouts at the time of Reagan’s death. While Kerry takes a break, chances multiply for Bush to look presidential – or at least make that I’m-sad-confused-serious face I’m sure he practices in the mirror.

There’s also the question of how closely Bush will be connected with Reagan. Bush knew Reagan through his father, veep Bush senior, but it’s unlikely a degree of separation alone will help his campaign. Just as Kerry is trying to reduce damage after the death, the Bush campaign is starting to carefully walk a fine line to gain some benefit. They can’t appear to capitalize directly but conservative pundits are already drawing comparisons to the way Bush handles his challenges and the way Reagan handled his.

Frank Gaffney, former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan Administration, was quoted by the AP this week saying, "The most important legacy that Ronald Reagan left was the proven philosophy of peace through strength -- a philosophy that he articulated and applied most decisively with respect to bringing down the Soviet Union," he says. "It is also, I think, a philosophy that is guiding President Bush in the present global conflict, which bears in fact some important similarities to the Cold War -- what some call 'World War Three.'"

Cold War = War on Terrorism
Reagan = Bush
Get it?

Another cliché campaign tactic involves tying current candidates to heroes past. The past two Republican conventions have featured former Republican presidents prominently. At the last one there were endless video montages of Reagan, Bush, and Ford cut with clips of them sitting together in the audience. The message is obvious, ‘hey, these guys were great, elect one of us again.’ When Nancy Reagan came out on stage during the ’96 convention the initial standing ovation took longer than the amount of time she spent speaking. Dubya’s campaign overtly did everything it could to connect him with his father and Reagan’s administrations and it’s likely they will do it again this year.

Even if voters never transfer their love of the now canonized Reagan to the current President directly, Reagan’s death can still have a positive effect on Bush’s poll numbers. Whenever there is a greater appreciation for the office of the presidency during an election year it tends to favor the incumbent. Reagan made the presidency quasi-regal. During his time in office he made it seem like America had never seen better days (if you don’t look at AIDS, high unemployment, and a ten fold increase in the homeless population). Images of Reagan dancing with Nancy and telling Gorbechev to tear down walls create nostalgia for the greatness of Reagan and his times, which can lift Bush a bit. On the contrary, the stark differences between America’s grandfather and the bumbling product of nepotism may do more harm than good.

There’s no guaranteed increase in percentage points for Bush. Reagan’s death may be huge news this week, forgotten the next. But if there is any effect on the election it will benefit Bush and hurt Kerry. Just how much will depend on how both utilize this turn of events. My guess is that plans for the Republican convention just got shuffled and we can expect to see subtle references to the cold war in Bush’s speeches till November. Maybe Reagan will play a cameo in an upcoming ad.

It may seem a calloused response to a President’s passing but I expect someone in each campaign is thinking along these lines. In the type of close election where every little step matters, how a candidate finesses the death of a popular leader can push him in either direction.