What Would Happen If We All Refused To Go Quietly To The Slaughterhouse?

Image by Glenn Halog via Flickr

The Essays of The Man From the North by Rivera Sun
Writer, Dandelion Salad
December 14, 2016

We are serving ourselves up on silver platters to the oligarchs and giant corporations. We have apples of misinformation in our mouths and sprigs of patriotic parsley tucked behind our ears. Must we complacently acquiesce to being pot-roasted pigs? Rise up!

The situation is more than intolerable . . . it is ridiculous . . . it is obscene. Our citizenry behaves like swine in the feedlots of the giant corporations and their rich owners. We eat the swill they slop down of toxic food, poisonous lies, mind-numbing media, and soul-crushing policies of oppression. We roll in the muck too moribund to rise up and organize for life, liberty, and love!

Have you ever seen a wild boar? Hairy, black, powerful, untamed, muscular? Have ever seen the wild sow, alert, protective and nurturing of her young? Have you seen the natural liveliness and intelligence of the lithe, quick piglets raised in woodlands and meadows, not muck and feedlots?

Are you content to live out your days, numbed and enslaved, slated for the slaughterhouse? To be destined only to put profits into rich people’s pockets? To be basted in lies and roasted in the fire of injustice? To be carved up slice-by-slice and devoured by gluttons? To condemn your children to the same fate?

Before there were masters and owners, overseers and butchers, merchants and chefs, the pig was wild, untamed, and free. It chose where it roamed. It ate when hungry. It rested when tired.

It is said that the pig is more intelligent than the dog. Yet, most of its species is enslaved to the greed of human cravings. The human being is allegedly far more intelligent than the swine, and yet, under the surface of our acculturation, are we not locked in feedlots of work, rent, bills, and debt? Are not our whole lives one long production line for rich people’s profits? Is not our freedom as equally illusory as the pig’s, lasting only as long as no one attempts to break free?

These are unsettling questions. But when abattoirs and silver platters await us, perhaps we ought to be uneasy. Perhaps we ought to be eyeing the holes in the fences. Perhaps we ought to be discussing what would happen if we all refused to go quietly to the slaughterhouse. Perhaps we ought to fast from the swill and let the pinch of hunger sharpen our eyes to the truth.

---

Author/Actress Rivera Sun syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection and other books, and the Programs Coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence. http://www.riverasun.com

The Man From the North is a fictional writer in Rivera Sun’s novel, The Dandelion Insurrection. The novel takes place in the near future, in “a time that looms around the corner of today”, when a rising police state controlled by the corporate-political elite have plunged the nation into the grip of a hidden dictatorship. In spite of severe surveillance and repression, the Man From the North’s banned articles circulate through the American populace, reporting on resistance and fomenting nonviolent revolution. This article is one of a series written by The Man From the North, which are not included in the novel, but can be read here.

from the archives:

Corporate Demons Possess Our Nation’s Soul

Resisting Operation Extract and Export

The Man From the North: Disrupt! Interrupt! The Ground of Resistance is Ours. by Rivera Sun

The Man From the North: Shopping as an Act of Resistance by Rivera Sun

David Kirby on “The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy and Poultry Farms on Humans and the Environment”