Let's start the New Year off with a BANG! Let's discuss Michael Vick and the US of A's fickle and double standard society at large. While having a butt load of meat, such as chickens raised in heinous conditions, veal from calves that have never seen the light of day and farmed fish that have never known the freedom of the open seas, in our freezers and on our shelves society continues to condemn Vick's past involvement in dog fighting.
Vick was released from prison in 2009 after serving a 23-month sentence at Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas as punishment for his involvement with the Bad Newz Kennels, a dogfighting operation Vick ran at an estate he owned in rural Virginia. While dog-fighting was a part of his cultural heritage he owned up to it as being illegal and he took his punishment "like a man," and while in prison didn't blame others, even when financial ruin followed shortly behind.
He has since left prison and been re-instated in the NFL to playing status, hired by the Eagles and is doing very well for himself and that appears to really, really piss people off. Apparently, he was supposed to get out of prison, start shooting up heroin, and end up out on the streets having spasmodic flashbacks to the times when he was violent with dogs. Just as we all do with each bite of our Insert-the-State-Here Fried Chicken, right?
How many people watch dog fights? If this wasn't a popular event would it be a profitable one? Are we concerned that all those people watching these events are out there, walking our streets, probably policemen, firemen, teachers, childcare providers, bus drivers, and health care providers? Are we outraged about how they are just living "normal" lives right now? Maybe that item they just bought online from you came from their winnings after betting on a dogfight?
Society is outraged at Vick not only because he picked an animal that many of us consider "cute" to treat like many of us treat the animals we eat, but because he also belongs to that station many of us have chosen to idolize. If it was an entertainer from another spectrum of the talent pool, such as a movie star, would there be any doubt of him returning to the screen? Would someone suggest that his guild card be pulled? Vick is merely an entertainer, something a portion of society has yet to acknowledge. Sports are entertainment, people. When the sport they are participating in stops being entertaining people will stop watching. If people stop watching the money stops. If that isn't a definition of what entertainment is I don't know a better one. Stop making entertainers into gods and you won't be outraged when they are human beings.
Vick broke a CULTURAL law, folks. He hurt an animal that has a face, an animal that many of us choose to have as pets and choose to attribute human feelings to. He said sorry, and he had his freedom revoked for 23 months. He can never own a firearm nor can he vote. Forever he has the word "felon" on his resume. But that isn't enough for some folks. Nope, they want him to either continue living only if it is a miserable life, or to have been actually executed for conducting dog fights!
Everything that we do, as human beings, has an impact on life around us. Is the answer to this fact complex laws regulating all of our movements? That would seem to be what many people want to see happen. "One law fits all" society where we each take pleasure in tattling on each and everything that we see the other doing. I honestly see little difference between what Vick was doing and what happens to veal calves or fish. People talk about the horrors that deer go through being chased by hunters but no one sticks up for the fish being played out by the sports fisherman. Why? Because fish aren't cute. It's hard, even after Finding Nemo, to ascribe human empathy to fish.
Over and over again those who want the environment, be it cultural, political or physical, to go their own way look for the short cut of doing it by force rather than by education but it is well proven that when people are educated and make a change because they own the ideas the change spreads and inspires more change, the changes feeding on one another. And yes, they are not controlled.and can be chaotic for a while. They are born out of the best in us which cannot be controlled, at the most it can be guided.
When our educational systems join the 21st century and teaches our children how to learn instead of what to learn, when the system relearns what its ultimate goal is, then will our society begin to change in a profoundly different and deeper way. When we look at our children as gems waiting to be mined, and not by us but by their ownselves, our society will change. The cruelties that we see, manifesting themselves against animals, the earth, whoever or whatever is "different", will fall by the wayside of our own volition.
Until then, our prisons will remain full of addicts, the mentally and emotionally crippled, the political dissenters, the cultural mores challengers and the very few real criminals that choose to inflict carnage on their fellow man to satisfy their own selfish desires.
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