Watch this shit, please. Just watch it. Mama, I know you don’t like me cussin’ on here, but you’ll refer to it the same way I do, I’m sure.
Okay, can we talk about this?

Let me start by saying I’m generally torn on PETA. It’s hard for me to evaluate them because their cause just isn’t important to me. I think it’s foul that people do inhumane things to animals–what an oxymoronic phrase, btw–but it ain’t foul enough to make me take it to the streets. Perhaps that’s because I have too many good things to say about chicken, but I can’t see how people get this worked up over animals. I can’t even understand people’s affection toward house pets. My sister has a cat that tends to make it home for holidays or whenever she’s out gallavanting, and I don’t like that lil’ sucker, and he’s cute as all get out. I see people with their animals in sweaters and all that shit, and I wonder why those people don’t just give the money they put into that animal into me. Dogs don’t have mortgages, so give me the money to put on my crib before putting a flat screen in Fido’s doghouse.
Okay, that’s a little off the point, but the fact still remains that animal rights just aren’t pressing to me. One of the sad parts of the world is that humans have to eat other things in order to survive. In fact, all animals do. Even the domesticated ones. That’s horse in dog food.
(Random–did you know that Jack In The Box was–or maybe still is–owned by Ralston Purina? That prompted my brother once to utter the classic line, “What if Purina got their shipments messed up? Horse–the other red meat.”)
Anyhoo, that’s just what it is. Animals are going to die so people can live. I’m sure some vegan is pounding away at a comment in reply to this, but I’m not going through all that work to eat. Eating should be easy, and I’m too damn skinny already to be trying to live on sprouts and supplements. If I went veggie, I’d be dead by the end of the week.
That’s all unnecessary background information, though. Where PETA leave me torn is in their practices. I believe that anyone that feels strongly about a cause should pursue it fervently, but they should proceed with at least a modicum of sense. Just a lil’ bit, dig? PETA never does that, though. They hurl blood at people and make greater spectacles of themselves and their causes than could ever be desirable for a body hoping to institute change. They behave with desperation, as though their lives are on the line, and they lose because everyone knows their lives aren’t on the lines. The animals, maybe, but not them. As a result, they look like nutjobs, and it’s hard to elicit support as a nutjob except from other nutjobs, and people are scared of rooms full of nutjobs. Their techniques are also antiquated, and sixties nostalgia is just about gone with most folks. They need to make a determination of whether getting on TV is as important as getting something done.
With this campaign, PETA has made a few serious mistakes. First, they showed that they must not have any black people in their operation. Comparing a lynching to the slaughter of a chicken is pretty insulting. One major mistake far left-wing white groups tend to make is comparing the plight of the oppressed to something that’s not quite analogous. My ancestors are not on the same plane with animals. “Chicken George” was just a name, man.
And now, we’re left with the real philosophical question. Scientific racism put blacks and others on the same plane with animals. Black folks weren’t people. “Nigger” may as well have have been a class, order, or phylum. Humans were treated like animals, and that was unforgivable. Is it similarly unforgivable to treat animals like people? No matter what the means of normalizing the standard by which life should be evaluated, people and animals are being put side by side. In this case, it looks like only non-white people are being put on that plane. Is that cool?
I don’t think it is. Instead of rallying people toward their cause, they’ve managed to alienate even more people with this silliness. No matter hwo terrible I may be or how glorious animals may appear, they are not the same as me.
Don’t treat me like an animal, even if that’s not an insult within your value system.