How much do I value creating a socially comfortable situation, and how much do I value acting socially responsible?
We celebrate together, and that makes sense. And we don’t just gather, we eat. This wasn’t always so. The federal government first thought to promote Thanksgiving as a day of fasting, since that was how it had been frequently observed for decades.
Producing and eating our own food is, historically, much of what made us Americans and not subjects of European powers. While other colonies required massive imports to survive, early American immigrants, thanks to help from Native Americans, were almost entirely self-sustaining.
Era o tristete printre el si fotografie si nimic pe lume nu ma speria mai mult.
Cutting down that tree was my last war!” I asked him who won, which I thought was a nice question, because it would let him say that he won, and feel proud. He said, “The ax won! It’s always that way!
Food is not so much a symbol of freedom as the first requirement of freedom. We eat foods that are native to America on Thanksgiving to acknowledge that fact. In many ways, Thanksgiving initiates a distinctly American ideal of ethical consumerism. The Thanksgiving meal is America’s founding act of conscientious consumption.
I started inventing things, and then I couldn’t stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it’s because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn’t constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That’s how my brain was.
Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don’t need the option of buying children’s toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don’t need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.
We have waged war, or rather let a war be waged, against all of the animals we eat. This war is new and has a name: factory farming.
But it’s turtles all the way down!
Those who defend pig factory farms argue that the farrowing crate is necessary because sows can sometimes accidentally crush their piglets. In the same way that the risk of a forest fire can be reduced by preemptively clearing the forest of all its trees, there is a cockeyed logic to this claim. The farrowing crate, like the gestation crate, confines the mother in a space so small she cannot turn around. Sometimes she will also be strapped to the floor.
Historians tell a story about Abraham Lincoln, that while returning to Washington from Springfield, he forced his entire party to stop to help some small birds he saw in distress. When chided by the others, he responded, quite plainly, “I could not have slept to-night if I had left those poor creatures on the ground and not restored them to their mother.
Eram ca doi prieteni. Pentru prima oara de cand ma stiam, m-am simtit in intregime bine.
Shame is the work of memory against forgetting. Shame is what we feel when we almost entirely – yet not entirely – forget social expectations and our obligations to others in favor of our immediate gratification.
There were those who suspected that he was not pinned under his wagon but swept out to sea, with the secrets of his life kept forever inside him, like a love note in a bottle, to be found one morning by an unsuspecting couple on a romantic beach stroll.
While we pursue happiness, we flee from contentment.
The soul was not ready to transcend, but was sent back, given a chance to right a previous generation’s wrong.
Every time I left our apartment to go searching for the lock, I became a little lighter, because I was getting closer to Dad. But I also became a little heavier, because I was getting farther from Mom.
And so was the synagogue lifted and moved. It was in 1783 that wheels were attached, making the shtetl’s ever-changing negotiation of Jewishness and Humanness less of a schlep.
She presents food and drink to customers there, and says to me, “I mount the autobus for an hour to work all day doing things I hate. You want to know why? It is for you, Alexi-stop-spleening-me! One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be a family.