Hot damn do we love it when the giants come a tumblin’ down! Making Mike Vick wrong has rapidly become the latest piece of slog that the MSM would have us up in arms about. By now we all know the basic gist of the case: that Mr. Michael Vick, Virginia Tech alum, endorsement king, and magically-talented superstar QB of the Atlanta Falcons, has pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy surrounding his dog-fighting empire, the Bad Newz Kennels in Virginia. He supposedly doesn’t admit to either gambling (which is a huge NFL no-no) or actually executing the dogs, although these admissions seems to factually differ from the official “Statement of Facts” bearing Mr. Vick’s John Hancock, not to mention defy common sense. Are we really to believe that Mike set up this operation but never placed a bet on a single dogfight? Mike’s legal and PR team may succeed in keeping his sentence light, but fail miserably in maintaining the respect of his fans.

Nevertheless, PETA must be having a field day with this one, especially since it’s incredibly easy for a country of dog-loving people to condemn Mike for his involvement in this horrifying enterprise. No one is defending him outright, although several are saying that the media coverage offered by the MSM (and everyone else under the sun) equates to a racist character assassination.

I’m not here to defend Mike; in fact, my Monkey Mind wants to go to town on his brutal canine-abusing ass. But when I step back a minute, feed the Monkey some organic baby carrots so he’ll shut up a second so I can connect to how I feel inside about all this, I come up with one fundamental observation. How can we be so quick to judge Mr. Vick for his wrongdoings when we are all card-carrying citizens of a Society of Death?
You can’t swing a dead cat around on a string these days without bumping into something that has been killed, is about to be killed, or wants to kill another living being.

What the hell am I talking about? Well, let’s start with the consumption of meat. Or as I like to call it, the Rotted Flesh of a Formerly Living Being, or Rofflib for short. Our palate is completely Rofflib-centric. Most of us think nothing of the fact that in a majority of American restaurants, about the only entree you can get without Rofflib in it is most likely mac n’ cheese on the kid’s menu. Since giving up eating meat about six months ago, I’ve been amazed at the scarcity of non-Rofflib options available within the mainstream dining experience. And I can’t tell you how many times I inquire my server about vegetarian options, and I am asked, “Do you eat seafood, because we have a great lobster bisque?”

“What about vegetarian did you not understand?” my Monkey Mind urges me to retort, as I consider walking out of the joint, my wife reading that intention on my face like a book. But it’s not a Monkey Mind-bating minor inconvenience like this that really bother me. It’s the overall lack of connection we have to what we put into our bodies that keeps me up at night. And let’s call a spade a spade: we are waging a war, a genocide, against living creatures, just so we can feed the frame for another day. Read Diet for a New America, or if reading isn’t your thing, go rent Fast Food Nation and fast forward it to the final scene, or check out the website, www.themeatrix.com for a better idea of how we are torturing millions of animals every day and brutally slaughtering millions more every year, to keep up with our feverish demand for Rofflib. And I’m not even talking about the disgusting way we’ve come up with delicacies like foie gras or veal. I’m talking about that Angus beef steak you’re gnawing on or that chicken cutlet sandwich you grabbed for lunch. Mike Vick’s dogs lived painful, brutish, bloody existences, but I can assure their lives and deaths were no more brutal than the millions of poor chickens, pigs, and cows that we have crammed into tiny cages, where they slowly go insane, pumped with chemicals and hormones, forced to eat cannibalistic genetically-modified feed, while they await their inevitable demise. Did you know that many chicken farmers remove the chickens’ beaks to prevent them eating each other in their over-crowded holding pens? As school children, we all learned from very early on that “we are what we eat.” This truth takes on new meaning when we understand that we are consuming the diseased and terrified life energy of these animals when we ingest them every day of our lives.

Where’s the outrage? Where’s the self-righteous holier-than-thou condemnation that we reserve only for Mike Vick and his colleagues? I know what you’re thinking: how can I be so bold as to attempt to compare killing dogs for sport with killing animals for food? I mean, farm animals feed us, give us life. God made animals taste good so we can sustain the human race, right? I understand that humans have been killing animals for as long as we’ve been experiencing hunger pangs, but I can assure that our society would sure as hell eat a lot less meat if we had to slaughter, clean, and dissect our animals ourselves. Sure some hunters do this every day. All the power to them. I have no “beef” with most hunters. Many hunters do share a connection to the circle of life, completely understand the bloody realities of taking another life, and therefore appreciate the venison they put into their bodies on a much more profound and visceral level than many of us will ever come to grips with.

My Monkey Mind wants me to judge Michael Vick to feel better about myself. It has been said that our view of the external world is a mirror to our own souls. What we see on the outside reveals the hidden truths we keep inside. As with most judgments that we Monkey Mind-driven humans make, our collective disgust for Mike Vick reveals the disdain we have for ourselves that we are too disconnected to recognize. Intuitively we know we have leading roles in the Society of Death. We are Michael Vick every day we consume a factory-farm produced piece of Rofflib. We are Michael Vick every time we order up a plate of chicken tenders for our little ones when their stomachs are empty.

My personal rule is that if it swam, crawled, or walked, and I didn’t kill it myself, I’m not eating it. There are many reasons why I recently chose to become a vegetarian.

I will talk more about the fabled Society of Death in future posts.