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Ordinary Cruelty

Sticking point #7: “Before I can begin my work, I have to be thoroughly prepared against any pratfalls by which I might humiliate myself.”

I’ve never met an artist who didn’t have an anecdote to share about childhood bullies, though some stories are more infuriating (and heartbreaking) than others. In her book, Beasts of Burden, vegan artist and activist Sunaura Taylor, who was born with a condition called arthrogryposis, recalls how her classmates taunted her for “walking like a monkey” and excluded her from playground games in which she could have easily participated. My experiences were mild in comparison: a drawing of a dog on the sewing-room chalkboard labeled “Camille”; acrylic paint chips thrown at my head in art class whenever our teacher turned his back; an enormous dead insect left stinger-side up on my chair in Latin class with a note that read SUCK MY GLADIUS. Even now, at the age of thirty-seven, my stomach drops whenever I hear teenagers laughing in the street. It depresses me to think of all I haven’t said or done for fear of ridicule, then and now.

Last fall, I went for a three-hour drive with a friend who was starting the audiobook of Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly, and as we listened to Brown’s explanation of what she calls the “Viking or Victim” mentality, I remembered not just those bullies from my middle and high school years, but the teens since then who have committed suicide after one too many run-ins with Internet trolls, the students and teachers gunned down in their classrooms, the unarmed Black men and women murdered by the police. Brown writes, “Either you’re a Victim in life—a sucker or loser who’s always being taken advantage of or who can’t hold your own—or you’re a Viking—someone who sees the threat of being victimized as a constant, so you stay in control, you dominate, you exert power over things, and you never show vulnerability.” Time and again, my parents would say the kids who mocked me were only diverting attention from their own insecurities, but, even as a child, that explanation struck me as inadequate. The “Viking or Victim” mindset is encoded in our most fundamental patriarchal notions of what it means to be human; it is a very old (and thus taken-for-granted) paradigm dictating that you cannot empower yourself without disempowering someone else. In Daring Greatly, Brené Brown also writes that “cruelty is cheap, easy, and chickenshit,” but I can only agree with her to a point. Eating and wearing animals are the easiest cruelties of all.

© Jerry Drave, Song for a Lost Home, digital illustration, 2018.

@illusdrave

It is no great stretch to suppose that we learned how to dominate and brutalize our fellow humans by practicing first on domesticated animals, controlling every aspect of their reproduction before violently ending their lives. The connections are blatant: Southern plantation owners treating humans like livestock; Black Americans “animalized” in various ways by white supremacists to this day; Jewish people transported to the Nazi death camps in cattle cars; the US Department of Homeland Security literally caging children they’ve separated from their parents; Donald Trump saying of “undesirable” immigrants, “These aren’t people, these are animals.” A figure like Trump draws power from victimizing others, in this case by denying these “aspiring Americans” their fundamental needs.

To come to terms with the various ways in which the “Viking or Victim” psychology has affected our emotional and creative lives, we must acknowledge that we ourselves have practiced cruelty by proxy. Behind the bacon is a creature who has suffered tail and ear clipping and castration, all without anesthesia. Behind the breakfast omelet is a system in which the boy chicks, “useless” to the industry, are thrown into a trash can or ground up in an industrial macerator, and in which chickens’ beaks are cut or burned off (again, without painkillers) to prevent them from pecking each other out of sheer frustration inside their tiny battery cages. Behind the milk is a mother whose children have been taken from her again and again until she is too worn out to continue—so that she may very well be inside your hamburger as well. All of these animals endure excruciatingly painful lives in cramped and filthy conditions (lying or standing in their own and others’ feces) before they are slaughtered on dis-assembly lines. If you are brave enough to search for it, you may find footage of slaughterhouse workers kicking the animals who struggle, screaming and cursing at them, stabbing at their soft bellies with pitchforks. These men, in turn, have been bullied by their corporate overlords.

Here is the truth of it then: I would be teased and mocked at school, and then I would come home and consume fried eggs and meatballs, chocolate chip cookies, and tall glasses of milk. I was complicit in a system of cruelty I thought I would have done anything to overturn if only I were older and stronger and smarter. Now I have grown into that person, and I want to know why we who are brave enough to be vulnerable don’t recognize the feelings of the most vulnerable creatures of all. We artists are supposed to understand better than anyone how cruel it is to mock or bully people who don’t think or act or look like we do. It is our empathy that allows us to render our characters alive enough to cheer for, real enough to cry over, but something’s not connecting. In 2010 a scientific study (organized by the neuroscientist Massimo Filippi) indicated that the brain activity of those who accept the moral argument in defense of animals is more responsive to images of both human and animal suffering than that of meat eaters. In reaction to the torment of another, the vegetarian brain lights up where the omnivore’s brain does not.

In his book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi doesn’t put too fine a point on it: citing bull and dogfighting, gladiatorial combat, boxing, and other displays of culture, he writes that “cruelty is a universal source of enjoyment for people who have not developed more sophisticated skills.” This is true not just of the pint-sized brutes who terrorize the schoolyard—already living a stereotype at the age of seven or ten—but of those who have not refined their critical thinking to the point that they are able to discuss our treatment of animals without resorting to hostility or contortioned logic. Ashley Capps wrote a poem about a cow she saw in a pasture every day for months until one day she wasn’t there and never would be again—“A hip pulls / loose, shoulders dismantle in the hands / of some masked worker. There is nothing / in this world that loves you back”—and to dismiss these lines as sentimental would not be a “sophisticated” response.

Most humans are able to look back with a sense of perspective on the insults and bruises they’ve received. I was lucky to have parents, stepparents, and other family members who consistently nurtured my self-esteem, and I never had cause to feel unsafe or unloved. They told me life would get easier, and it did: as I grew up, I cared less and less what anyone might think of me, my writing, or any of my other creative efforts. It’s never going to get easier for the animals, though. They can’t ever transcend their tormentors so long as people like us are still eating and wearing the products of their bodies. As German activist Malte Hartwieg says, “You like farm animal rescue stories, but you’re not vegan? Do you realize that those farm animals are being rescued from you?”

The artist who offered this “sticking point”—a photographer, scriptwriter, and blogger, a very nice man who was likely bullied in school far worse than I was—is the kind of omnivore who agrees with every vegan-themed post I put up on social media. Habit is the only thing holding him back from going veg, and I suppose he manages to put those thoughts out of his head when he sits down to dinner. But to me, this doesn’t seem so different from standing by silently while the class jerk beats up your best friend. “Teach us to care and not to care,” T.S. Eliot wrote in “Ash Wednesday,” and this is the paradoxical path of us sensitive souls: to care less about what the trolls and bullies say and think, and care more for those on the receiving end of the torment, even when they don’t look like us.

Recalibrating Your Language

Begin training yourself to notice the cruelty encoded in many of the words and figures of speech we take for granted. “Killing it” and “crushing it” have entered the popular vernacular as a way of saying someone is doing really well—but killing or crushing whom? (It turned my stomach to see the photo a high-school classmate posted of his two-year-old daughter holding a small fish at the end of a line. “She’s killing it!” he enthused. Indeed, she has.) Notice when you or the people around you inadvertently use language that demeans animals or other humans, and consider how you might express the same idea more compassionately: “kill two birds with one stone” can become “feed two birds with one hand,” “killing it” can become “acing it,” and so on. Colleen Patrick-Goudreau dives deep into animal-related language and etymologies in her Animalogy podcast, which I highly recommend.

Here’s another example, a line I love from Henry Lien’s novel Peasprout Chen, Future Legend of Skate and Sword: “How tenderhearted he is to love even things that are so different from us.” Peasprout is only just waking up to the truth of animal suffering; in the future she will not refer to animals as “things,” and she may say “who” instead of “that.” It may seem like a small matter, but referring to an animal as she or he instead of it de-objectifies and dignifies that animal (even if you’re not sure of the sex; I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be called a he than an it!)