iBook Camping for a PETA Zealot

Is there any point to using a computer without the internet?

What can you still do on a computer when not connected to the net?

Wordprocessing
Spreadsheets
Home Finances
Graphic Design
Digital Photography
Digital Music (if you want to manually type in all of the song titles when importing from a CD)
Programming

Spotlight makes a lousy application launcher because it doesn’t focus on applications first and it results list jumps around too much while it is finalizing the results. QuickSilver makes a much better application launcher.

Am I a total geek for taking my iBook camping? I really just wanted to see if there was any wireless out here in the great outdoors. The closest town is 20 miles away. It’s a place called Richfield, UT. I drove there last night to get a few items. I used the self check out at Albertson’s. The busy body who works the self check out says, about the cage free eggs I’m buying, “A clear package. I’ve never seen an egg package like that.”

I’m thinking, ‘Really? You only work here. Take a walk around once in a while.’

Then she says, “At that price, I guess I won’t be buying those. That’s a lot for eggs.”

Finally, I turn around and say, “It’s because they’re cage free...”

“Oh, so the eggs have never been in cages?”

“No, the hens. The hens aren’t raised in cages.”

“Oh, so does that make them like organic and all natural.”

“Sort of, but it’s really more about buying cruelty free eggs. Have you ever seen the conditions that caged hens are kept in? It’s not very pretty.”

This was sort of the end of the conversation. She made some remark about not having ever seen how hens are raised but that her hens run about and think they are in charge of things at her place. And, really, good for her if she’s keeping hens in an environment where they aren’t locked up in cages and so she probably doesn’t buy store bought eggs and therefore the $3.60 I was paying for eggs from cage free, vegetarian fed hens seemed a bit outrageous to her. But really, that wasn’t just it, the moment I said, ‘cruelty free’ in regards to how hens are raised she started to turn away. Once she knew that my paying more for the eggs was not just out of a desire to have all natural or organic eggs but, that I was actually concerned with whether or not hens are treated cruelly or not, she wanted to instantly distance herself from me.

I find this sort of behavior over and over again among people in this culture. I know many people who eat animals on a daily basis and wear animal skins or buy furnishings made out of animal hides and part of why they do this is because it is easily available to them and another part of why they do it is because they have convinced themselves that the animals are well treated while they are alive and that they are probably even slaughtered in a quick and relatively painless manner. I think on some level they know these things aren’t true but, they consciously choose ignorance even though information is available to show them otherwise. I think they do this because they know that once they give up their self imposed veil of ignorance they might have to give up their comfortable laziness and habitual consumption of animal products because they would then realize what they already really know and are just pretending to be ignorant of, that the animals they consume are raised and slaughtered in abject misery and cruelty and that by buying the products and continuing the eating habits that they have they are actually responsible for the abuse of these poor creatures.

I have a coworker who is an active mormon and (I don’t know why, I shouldn’t) I always tease him about having a “word of wisdom problem”. The “word of wisdom” is the term that mormons use to identify a particular revelation that god supposedly gave to Joseph Smith in the 1800’s that outlines a health code that mormons should follow. Among other things that it says, it basically says that god would be very pleased if people only ate animals when no other food sources were available. It says that mormons should eat meat sparingly. Amazingly, mormons have focused on a few other parts of this health code, like the call to abstain from tobacco and alcohol but, they just ignore the call the only eat meat in times of famine or in the winter (when plant based foods might have been scarce in the 1800’s). Even though basically all of the mormons I have ever known eat meat centered diets, they tell themselves that they “eat meat sparingly.” It’s odd how “sparingly” and “2 - 3 times daily” can be congruous in their minds.

Anyway, this coworker of mine was recently proffering the argument that a chicken could serve no other purpose than to be a meal for him. He was asking, what other purpose could it serve and saying that chickens were created by god to be food for men. So, I asked him if even if that was true, did all the chickens he ate have to live lives of misery and be slaughtered in painful and cruel ways before they got to his plate? I offered to show him videos of how modern chickens are raised and slaughtered. His response? He said he didn’t want to see it and he didn’t want to know about it.

Much like the woman at the checkout at Albertson’s, once the subject of being concerned about how animals are treated came up, he no longer wanted to pursue the conversation. He had no desire to know the real effects of his dietary choices, particularly if it meant that the choices he’s so used to making on a daily (yet, somehow “sparingly”) basis are actually causing pain suffering in innocent creatures.