Successful Activism!

I feel so alive right now!

I just got out of our film screening of Fowl Play and never have I felt more grounded and committed to my ideals! Everything just clicked -- it's such a great film (I had seen it before) and people responded positively to it! Not only did the people there respond positively to it, but there was a really good turnout! So many people are reevaluating their diets, they were all talking to the speaker afterward, and I'm just so thrilled to have been able to screen the film, to have organized a successful event. This is really giving me motivation for my future as an activist. Maybe this is the event that will give me force for the rest of the semester.
Oh, Dylan, you'd be so proud of me.

Thesis Mantra!

“Thus, rendering gender and masculinity visible offers a challenge to existing power relations and their continuing reiteration.”

– Beasley, Men & Masculinities (2008)

YES!

Eulogy

"Dylan Ravenfox was an incredible soul. I had the honor of living and working with Dylan at Farm Sanctuary during the summer of 2009. We became great friends right from the start and he taught me so many life lessons over the course of a few months, over so many dishes of red quinoa stir fries, over bowls of the local vegan ice cream, over nutritional yeast popcorn.

When I arrived at Farm Sanctuary as an admittedly disillusioned activist, Dylan gave me so much hope for the future. If people were as committed to changing the world as he was, maybe we could make a difference after all. His work in the Education Department had him giving tours of the farm to newcomers, and even when my housemate and I unsuspectingly snuck onto a tour to try to divert him from his task -- as pesky friends often enjoy doing -- we couldn’t do it. In spite of our best comical intentions, when he opened his mouth, the calm and sincere voice was not an employee reciting a tour by rote; here was as man who deeply believed in the words he was saying and saw Farm Sanctuary as a means of resisting structures of oppression. It was only at the end of the tour that I realized we hadn’t just gotten a tour of the farm; we had gotten a glimpse of Dylan in his element. Dylan’s drive to bring justice to the lives of animals was a flame that never burned out.

But he was more than an activist; at the very core, he was an artist. He was a skilled writer and anyone who knew Dylan knows that art just poured out of him. He carried his passion for art, for pottery, for language, for critical thought with him to every activist endeavor I saw him undertake. He reminded me how much art and social justice can overlap in beautiful ways and how we can sustain each other through art.

And though he’s gone, I know that flame is still burning, for he has passed it on to so many others. I miss him so much, but I know he will be with me forever, always inspiring me, pushing me forward, teaching me to be a better person and a more passionate voice for the animals."

Delivered Sunday October 3rd, 2010 at Haverford College.

le bon chemin

Left foot. Right foot.

Jonathan Soud just died of leukemia last Saturday. I didn't know him, but I know his father who taught at my high school, and he had a huge impact on my social networks at home. Leukemia is usually treatable in children. My mom said she diagnosed him, and he was going to be fine.

Left foot. Right foot.
My friend had liver pains yesterday, couldn't move her neck at all.
Left foot. Right foot.
My other friend suddenly threw her back out in rehearsal today and had severe pain. "I'm fine! I'm fine" she said, crying, trying to stand up.
Left foot. Right foot.
My friend's mom has been in the hospital for two weeks and they don't know what's wrong with her.
Left foot. Right foot.
I'm tired. So damn tired.
I can't write Dylan's eulogy. I just can't. The words. I just. Don't know what to say. I have to. But I know it's not going to be what I want to say. If he were alive, I don't know what I'd say to him.

Left foot. Right foot.
Fuck these feet. When does the bullshit end?

BirdWings by Rumi

Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror
up to where you’re bravely working.

Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
if it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every small contracting
and expanding,
The two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as bird wings.

Eat Rice, Have Faith in Women

Poring over Carol J. Adams' The Sexual Politics of Meat, she reminds us of a beautifully moving poem entitled "Eat rice have faith in women" by Fran Winant. I'm posting it here:

eat rice have faith in women
what I don’t know now
I can still learn
if I am alone now
I will be with them later
if I am weak now
I can become strong
slowly slowly
if I learn I can teach others
if others learn first
I must believe
they will come back and teach me
they will not go away
to the country with their knowledge
and send me a letter sometime
we must study all our lives
women coming from women going to women
trying to do all we can with words
then trying to work with tools
or with our bodies
trying to stand the time it takes
reading books when there are no teachers
or they are too far away
teaching ourselves
imagining others struggling
I must believe we will be together
and build enough concern
so when I have to fight alone
there will be sisters who
would help if they knew
sisters who will come
to support me later

women demanding loyalty
each with our needs
our whole lives torn by
the old society
never given the love or work
or strength or safety or information
we could use
never helped by the institutions
that imprison us
so when we need medical care
we are butchered
when we need police
we are insulted ignored
when we need parents

we find robots
trained to keep us in our places
when we need work we are told
to become part of
the system that destroys us
when we need friends
other women tell us
I have to be selfish
you will have to forgive me
but there is only so much time
energy money concern
to go around
I have to think of myself
because who else will...
I have to save things for myself
because I am not sure you could save me
if our places were reversed
because I suspect
you won’t even be around
to save me when I need you
I am alone on the streets
at 5 in the morning
I am alone cooking my rice

I see you getting knowledge
and having friends I don’t have
I see you already stronger than me
and I don’t see you coming back
to help me
I imagine myself getting old
I imagine I will have to go away
when I am too old to fight my way
down the streets
my friends getting younger and younger
women my age hidden in corners
in the establishment
or curled up with a few friends
isolated at home
or in the madhouse
getting their last shot of
motivation to compete
or grinding out position papers
in the movement
like old commies
waiting to be swept away
by the revolution
or in a hospital
dying of complications
nurse or nun
lesbian in clean clothes
reach out a hand to me
scientists have found
touching is necessary
and the drive to speak our needs
is basic as breath
but there isn’t time
none of my needs has been met
and although I am often comfortable
this situation is painful

slowly we begin
giving back what was taken away
our right to the control of our bodies
knowledge of how to fight and build
food that nourishes
medicine that heals
songs that remind us of ourselves
and make us want to keep on with
what matters to us
lets come out again
joining women coming out
for the first time
knowing this love makes
a good difference in us
affirming a continuing life with women
we must be lovers doctors soldiers
artists mechanics farmers
all our lives
waves of women
trembling with love and anger

singing we must rage
kissing, turn and
break the old society
without becoming the names it praises
the minds it pays

eat rice have faith in women
what I don’t know now
I can still learn
slowly slowly
if I learn I can teach others
if others learn first
I must believe
they will come back and teach me

Copyright: Fran Winant, reprinted in the Lesbian Reader, an Amazon Quarterly anthology

Eating Animals

I just finished Jonathan Safran Foer's book Eating Animals (albeit much later than I'd hoped to read it) and I cannot stop thinking about kind of cultural "storytelling" that surrounds meat consumption, particularly in the U.S. What kind of new stories can we tell around otherwise tradition-ladden holidays? What kind of cultural rewriting allows us to sustain our connection to heritage? Or do we even need to sustain that kind of tradition? Should our new-found ethics take the precedent over tradition and remind us of the newness of this new kind of ethical tradition we are forging? As a vegan, I love holding the cultural paintbrush right in my grip, and know that culture is a flexible and malleable thing. But reading Foer's book reminds me so much of the positive role that culture and tradition play for so many people.

Unlike many seemingly die-hard vegans and vegetarians (I often fall victim to this), Foer examines the importance of digging deep into the reality of things and then living one's life according to one's values -- something which I respect wholeheartedly. Framing the entire story through the need to choose what kind of life he should create for his son (more specifically, whether his son should eat meat or not), Foer does in-depth research on factory farms, family farms, and activist to pull the veil off of a world that is all too frequently forgotten.

What makes Foer's book so unique is that his story is one of paradox, of seemingly philosophical contradictions-- at the core, a nuanced understanding of how ethics and meat consumption can manifest in this country. As an accomplished writer, he dances through his sentences and hybridizes his space as both a quasi-narrative and quasi-non-fiction scientific literature, using no footnotes for his text chock full of statistics, but leaving all citations arranged by chapter at the end of the book for his readers.

To order a copy, visit Amazon.