Guilt, not just for Jewish women.

I am really trying to avoid eating meat, not because of the health benefits of eating only good vegetable and fruit but because in protest of the cruel way the farming industries raise, deliver, and slaughter their products. So, having decided that participating in this process makes me as guilty as the grown men punching squeezing the shit out of the chickens in some kind of sick sport, I avoid the meat. There are animals farmed and slaughtered humanely and are marked but I live in Arkansas where Tyson, and all the other mass farmers of animals rule so the chances of me getting ethically treated animal products is rare. Having said that, I must confess, I love the wings, can’t help it, love them and not the boneless ones, I want bone and little meat so that I have to work at getting the tiniest slivers of white and dark meat off and so my resolve not to eat meat was so tested the other day and alas, my resolve, it lost. I had six wings, which means three chickens, raised in terrible circumstances, transported on awful trucks, and butchered in the most inhumane ways, gave me those six wings. Today, I am suffering from wing guilt. It is right up there with sausage guilt. The sausage coming from my new found love of the Jewish religion and although I am not Jewish, I do try to hold some of their laws as my own, like the no pork. And there is the terrible way that hogs are treated too. We live in a complicated society, us humans, and in order to find some kind of balance, there has to be alternatives. I want chickens but I don’t want chickens that were treated badly. All of this seems so trivial when there are so many human atrocities going on like the torture of prisoners, the death penalty, the Katrina victims, and all of the other terrible things that nature and humans do to humans. But, just once, I wish the government would make the poultry and beef industries treat their animals better. They are not just food and besides, the laws from God says to treat the animal right and not cause it unnecessary suffering. So, the Jewish guilt that for so long only the Jewish folks had is now my guilt too. So I am going with humane treatment for all creatures, even chickens.