Now a "we're all monsters" meme

3quarksdaily: Monsters: "“We’re monsters, I fear. What monsters we’re”—it’s a line from a recent Frederick Seidel poem, “Downtown,” about the Fourth of July, and the sadness of fireworks over the Hudson (“the flavorful floating shroud”) and the casual brutality of eating shad roe (“What a joy to eat the unborn”). It reminds me of this whole, unlovely decade, which started downtown, and made us all monstrous, me as much as anybody. "

A universal and ethical perspective has trouble arising from the welter of self-recrimination in the above text. If the destruction of life in any form is sinful or unethical then all we can do is wallow in a sort of permanent cesspool of awareness. And contemn religion for closing our eyes to the slaughter whether of what we eat, what we conceive or of each other knowingly or not. The alternative is to accept that it is reality itself that makes such slaughter inevitable just as it is inevitable that conception involves a single male and a single female egg. Schweitzer included all in his reverence for life but Jesus gave no sign of vegan tendencies. The resolution lies in applying values to our decisions and recognizing that reality itself makes all of us in some respects parties to casual if not intended genocide. None is clean no one. Yet love must somehow triumph in the face of even this.


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