THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 43

I became a vegetarian when I was fifteen or so. I did it for animal rights & environmental reasons. I stopped being a vegetarian when I was 22 because I found that alienating people wasn’t working with the way I wanted to approach life at the time, also I got into eating weird street meat with my old friend Peatre. We would eat things like tongue & brain & other organ meats in Oakland Chinatown & from various Taco Trucks, it was great. It was at this time that I accepted the idea of moral relativity. Being vegetarian is clearly the right thing to do, although not being vegetarian is clearly not a big deal. You can get ratcheted up by animal-rights propaganda, but any propaganda can get you ratcheted up & assured that whatever particular issue you are concerned about is very important. I’m not advocating apathy at all. I’m saying that these specific issues aren’t as big as people make them out to be, the world is large, complicated & there are no easy answers. Certain framing tries to make some things out to be almost all encompassing in their importance. This is a trick of the framing. I remember reading an anti-vivisection pamphlet on the subway ride back from San Francisco & feeling the total (correct) revulsion with animal testing. The thing that wasn’t stated is that the alternative to animal testing is human testing. There are other non-options like no testing & non-production but ultimately what I needed to learn is that I could have an emotional reaction like revulsion, disgust & terror, have it, & not link that emotional reaction to some moral crusade. Almost everyone in these righteous moral crusades is projecting some intense emotions, usually about when they were a kid & had some sort of unacknowledged life disturbance that then turned into this Quixotic Crusade when they started to gain some agency over the world. Simply I’m saying shit happens, it’s a normal part of life & sometimes trying to stop the shit causes more, misunderstood problems to occur.