Of food, guns and me!
When I was around eight years old I talked my mother into getting me a Daisy B-B gun rifle. I enjoyed watching the B-B’s shoot out of it and go the distance that they went until they hit their appointed target. One summer day I was in front of our house in Vienna, Illinois and saw a young, immature bird sitting on a lawn chair. I took careful aim and fired a shot at the bird. I wasn’t sure that I had hit it so I fired again. The little bird began to cry plaintively but I continued to fire away until it was no more.
Something deep inside of me was offended by that action and I never tried to kill anything with that gun again.
My father had a chicken processing business in Vienna and, at ten years old, he felt that I needed to work in that facility during the summers. My job was to cut the heads off of already slaughtered chickens and pass them on to those who would gut and dress them out. Sometimes I would go back to the start of the plant and watch the chickens be placed on a rack hanging downward where their throats would be slit and they would wiggle and jerk around until they bled out and died. I knew that this had to be but it still bothered me and it was not until I was much older that I would find out just how much that bother really had amounted to be.
John Kennedy died on November twenty second, 1963 and for the longest time after that I would use my B-B gun rifle to try to recreate what had happened to him on that horrible day by shooting at army men that I owned in our back yard. There was this morbid fascination with how a little man with a cheap gun could have killed the most important and powerful man in the world and a person who had begun the formation of my political and civic life.
When I was a teen aged person my uncle tried to get me to go hunting with him and he got me to shoot a rabbit out on my grandfather’s farm. The poor little thing cried out just as plaintively as the young immature bird had done but my uncle made me shoot it again to put it out of the misery that I had gotten it into to start with. I never really liked my uncle much after that day and lost most of the respect that I had previously had for him. It never returned and I disliked the man until his death at the age of 92.
When I was in my thirties I began a regimen of running and I was quite effective at it. I would run two and a half miles a day and do it in a time that worked out to around eight minutes per mile. Over the course of time, my weight dropped from around 190 pounds to 143 pounds. I could eat just about anything that I wanted and never gain an ounce because I knew that I could get out in the morning and run it all off. One day I was at work and realized that I was too thin. I just didn’t feel right at the weight that I was maintaining. It was not long after that time that I gave up the running regimen and returned to my normal life and a higher weight. When I look at so many people who have run for most of their lives and have had to give it up because of knee and leg problems, I have no regrets about the decision that I made. I do miss, to this very day, the high that I got from a good run when the endorphins would cut loose and all was well with my world.
In the fall of 2006 I became sick with bowl problems and ended up with surgery and a very near death experience that left me, in the Christmas season of that year, looking at myself in the mirror and seeing a person who weighed 130 pounds. I knew that was not good for me and I tried my best to put some weight back on. It was a couple of years later, in February of 2008 that I experienced a religious conversion and began to change my whole life around. Among the changes that I made was to stop eating meat and to become a vegetarian. I soon realized that I needed protein so I began to seek out sources for that and the main one that I found was from the sea. I began to eat fish! The memories of the dead rabbit and the little bird that I had killed with that rifle so many years ago weighed heavily on my decision to abandon meat and still do to this very day. But the thing that I mention most to my friends when they ask about my vegetarianism is all of those chickens that were killed at my families business back in the 1960’s I like to remark to friends that my family had performed genocide on the chicken population. But it was really no joke.
These days I will not even kill a bug any longer as my reverence for life has advanced to that extent. If God made it, I will not see an end to its life. I remember doctor Albert Schweitzer and a similar track that he followed in his life as he expended it on his humanitarian missions on the continent of Africa. And I look on my aging cat Lucy as a great companion in this life.
I bring all of this up because there is a feeling running across much of America that seems to think that life at its highest form--humanity--is getting cheaper and cheaper by the day. We see young lives snuffed out by the use of guns and we see young women held in captivity for years and years at a time and we hear 911 reports that simply say that they will try to get a police car there as soon as one comes free. We owe ourselves and all of life much more than this type of attitude. Little children are being kicked off of Head Start programs that enrich their young lives by those who care nothing about them at all. It has all become a numbers game and that is very sad. But, there are people and animals and life of all sorts that are badly affected down this perverse food chain of politics and social Darwinism who are not understood and are given little chance at a life that those who came before them had. So many of these souls just want to live a decent life and, just perhaps, give something back to the community that might have helped them out and given them a lift up. Nothing feels better in life than to help another human being to enjoy a better life and those who do not feel that way are very sad beings indeed.
Sometimes when I am outside, I hear the chirp of a gentle songbird celebrating life to the fullest and sharing that with all who might want to listen and I thank God for the precious things that have been given to all of us. Life is precious and it is never cheap! And those who try to cheapen it only cheapen themselves.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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