If you drive south on I-95 from Washington, D.C., toward Richmond, Virginia, you can’t miss two huge Confederate flags, miles apart, deliberately placed so as to be unmissable from the highway. The message is more than a reminder that people are free to cling to offensive symbols and behavior; it’s meant as a poke in the eye to anyone arguing against the pain and real-life effects of discrimination.
Old attitudes are frustratingly slow to change. Society has accepted a lot of nastiness that it never should have, and there have always been bad actors among us.
It was only recently that the casting couch, something that was joked about for years, collapsed under the weight of the wrath of the women who had been pushed onto it, and it was just as recently that some powerful men who saw women as theirs for the taking were toppled from their pedestals like Confederate statues.
At PETA, we are familiar with the kind of messaging those Confederate flags impart because they convey a determination to cling to an idea that needs to be shaken loose and thrown aside. A plea to leave animals in peace is also medicine that doesn’t always go down well, either. Our message is pretty reasonable when you think about it: We ask only that all living beings, not just humans, be afforded respect and consideration, yet it is often met with a “Take that!” to the messenger: Men in camouflage clothing send us photographs of themselves spelling out an obscenity or PETA’s name in dead rabbits, ducks or geese; a small animal’s heart arrives in a box sent through the mail; and raw hamburger is smeared on our windows.
It is all part and parcel of supremacism. White supremacists, male supremacists and human supremacists share the belief that they have every right to use arbitrary differences between themselves and others as a justification for continuing to belittle, demean and exploit.
Those of us who value understanding over undervaluing can turn the other cheek, certainly, but if we want to change mindsets, we can’t turn the other way.
If it’s true that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, then those who seek justice must squeak. We must challenge not only the meanies’ biases but also those of everyone who has been brought up to believe that it’s OK for us to be casually cruel in our daily lives, including how we feed, clothe and entertain ourselves and even what we say (e.g., “kill two birds with one stone”).
Opportunities for conversations and for generosity of spirit abound, and we can create them. Along the river near me, I saw a woman fishing and noticed, as I was walking by, that she was using three-pronged gaffs, which tear into a fish’s mouth. I stopped and mentioned that the sight of them was disturbing because I had just had a squamous cell carcinoma removed from my lip and that even with anesthesia, it was unpleasant. I mentioned that fish’s mouths are highly enervated and that the pain must be awful for them.
“I like fish,” she said.
On my way back, I stopped and gave her a packet of soy fish fillets I’d picked up at the store. “Just try them,” I said, “You might enjoy them.” She put them in her ice chest and thanked me. Who knows whether my impact on her was life-changing, negligible or something in between. But I’m pretty sure that she’ll recount the incident to family and friends, thereby spreading my message.
Sociologists say that if children’s cruel deeds go uncorrected, they are likely to flex their “bully muscles” more and more as they get older. All serial killers report never having been pulled up short when, in childhood, they gigged frogs for fun or tortured the neighbor’s cat. Perhaps it’s too late to engage them, but it’s not too late to approach those “ordinary people” who have never thought carefully about the damage that their behavior and even their words can do.
In time, even the true meanies will be compelled to change, as the next generations, more aware, emerge and society wises up to its faults. For us to do our part today and every day, all we have to do is heed John Galsworthy’s words, “Be kind.”
