I never thought it through till now... am not sure I've done that yet.. but I take back my stand on protest by burning. It felt like a big waste, sacrilege even - burning down piles and piles of stuff just to protest against it... but then I'm starting to see the point.
See it all started with me trying to be vegetarian. We were at this restaurant earlier and per my new requirements I asked the waitress if a certain dish could be made without meat. She said she would check with the chef - which I understood to mean she would check to see if he could cook it without the meat. Ultimately though I ended up with a meat version of the dish - but with the meat pieces removed!
Anyway the dilemma was to eat or not eat. Since I am protesting against growing animals to eat their meat later, it felt wrong to eat the dish. But then the animal is already dead and I would be just wasting the food. A week back I'd have been relishing it! And so started a discussion on protest and burning/wasting stuff in protest. Like burning foreign clothes in protest, burning the recovered tusks of poached elephants. Wasting a can of coke cos its coke.
I felt bad about the tusks cos they are so magnificent, so they need to be valued not burnt! But then I realized, wanting them to be valued is promoting them as a possession. That's not what I want either! And so the only way out seems to be to destroy them. This sounds more like treating the symptoms and not the cause, but is there any other way around it? And why is it that I think something beautiful needs to be preserved?
2 comments:
hmm.. talking about burning objects/things to protest against the injustice [here it is cruelty shown] in the procrument and distribution of the thing - I think the protest itself is valid for the reason that you are preventing further injustice from occuring due to the object.
Now comparing this with food - hmm.. that might not be on the same plane. We will come back to it :)
If you think of it - necessary evils konni untai.. as in killing for food - if all animals were vegetarian - life on this planet would have fizzled out ages ago. So considering that eating non-veg is not the problem but how we treat the animals we grow [obviously not all of us can go hunting everyday] for food is the issue - there are different ways to protest the injustice. One of them being - becoming vegan. Now there's always going to be other people who will be non-vegetarian. This is just your way of protesting against what is wrong. My take on the approach is - its a slow fruitless approach - considering there's as many more people being born into the world and considering that a large percentage of whats coming is going to be non-vegetarian - i do not see a decrease in demand for Non vegetarian food due to the approach. There might be lower growth levels in demand but well - not much. So - the need to treat the animals better isn't being served. With increasing demand will come - unacceptable approaches to the procrument/distribution of the product.
Anyways - from my perspective - a more fruitful approach would be to demand 'organic meat' from places where the animals are grown in a more natural way. Whether we need to pay more for it is another day's discussion. The approach will work. An example to showcase why - is how most restaurants in the bay area serve only 'halal meat'. And the entrees don't cost a lot more than if you go to restaurants which serve otherwise. The reason is - the seller is aware that a significant section of the population will not eat NV at his restaurant unless he serves Halal meat.
adanna maata.. point enti ante - coming back to what we were discussing - destruction of goods to protest their usage is not valid for everything. How you protest something has got a lot to do with why you protest.
The tusks itself - burning them wasn't any form of protest. Its like burning drugs. You don't see smuggled gold/diamonds being burnt :)
About the tusk, I understand that burning them is to remove the trade of such things not a protest... it still feels like "destruction" :P
Yea I guess sometimes there are "necessary evils".
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