I imagine many of the people reading this have struggled with acceptance in your lives, I know I have, I know my wife has. Most of the people I know and love have. In one sense, I have come to believe a part of loving animals is a search for healing, community and acceptance.
So this morning, the two of us watched a video of Caitlyn Jenner’s very powerful acceptance speech (she got an award for courage) at the ESPN awards broadcast last night. We were both in tears, the talk was one of the most powerful television moments in recent memory.
For most of my life, such a talk would have been unimaginable. The life of the trans was a mystery, transgender people were never mentioned in my home or discussed in school or in public. When my friends mentioned it, it was only in the fearfully bigoted way of insecure men. When the idea of the transgender person was raised, it was in horror and revulsion, never in acceptance or understanding. For all the bad news we see, tolerance won a major victory on television last night, there is much reason to hope.
Jenner, as most of you know, was born Bruce Jenner, a famed Olympic athlete and American cult hero. Last year, at age 65, she chose to come out dramatically and in front of millions of people as a transgender person and acknowledge her secret identity as a woman, and her lifelong struggle to come to terms with it. She wanted, she said, to make a plea for acceptance.
If you want to cry, focus on her elderly mother, telling the world in an interview that it is the job of any mother to know her child and accept him or her. She never knew what was going on inside of her son.
Caitlyn is very much a woman now, and perhaps savior to many of her successors. I bought Wheaties because she was on the cover of the cereal box as Bruce. Now, she gets to be a hero to me again.
Why am I writing about this very poignant moment on my website, normally about other things? Because I think it is important, and I know it will touch the hearts and souls of many of the people reading this. Her very brave talk made me think about acceptance, choice and about identity.
At age 65, Jenner decided to become the woman she always felt she was inside, she chose to be authentic, to stop living a lie, a life in secret, to speak out on behalf of the idea of acceptance, often in peril in our divided culture, where the political ethos seems to be to hate those who are different from us.
And everyone is different from us. We are all different from one another, we are all our own unique fingerprints. Acceptance is a universal need, a universal gift, one of the greatest of human values. I believe acceptance is breaking out. In the decision to put the Confederate Flag in museums, where it deserves to be. In the Supreme Court’s decision to ratify the right of Americans to marry who they choose. In Pope Francis call for us to accept the reality of climate change and help heal our Mother, the earth. In the struggle to come to terms with race. In the search for peace, rather than war.
We all have this choice to make: accept one another or walk down the other path, the one to hatred and confusion.
In the acceptance of a transgender woman on prime-time national television. Ed Sullivan would be in a coma.
I see acceptance in the rise of consciousness of the next generation, who seem to embrace tolerance in a new way, perhaps because the Internet has freed them of their parent’s bigotry, anger and blindness and permitted them to talk with and listen to people who are different from themselves.
I suppose, in a way, this is what drew me to write about the New York Carriage Horses, I could not abide or accept the hatred in the words and deeds and hearts of the people seeking to ban them. Today, NYClass has launched yet another hate campaign against the New York Carriage Horses, this time in the form of Russell Simmons, the rapper, who claims pulling carriages in Central Park for a horse is the same thing as slavery or the Holocaust. The people seeking to ban the horses seem to know nothing about horses, slavery or holocausts.
Every time they speak, they remind us that they are a group that promotes hatred, not the rights or welfare of animals. As so often happens with hate groups, they are destroying themselves.
Jenner chose to be authentic in her life, even at age 65, even at the risk of losing her family, her children, the love of her mother. I confess I thought of my friend Paul Moshimer who committed suicide a few weeks ago, in his 65th year. He was not able to be authentic in that way, to live with the person he really was. He had to hide what was happening inside of him. I do not judge him for that, I fully love and accept him for who he was, just as Jenner asks acceptance for who he is.
Acceptance is, for me, a basic human right. Not always easy to do, but always important to do. The future of the world depends on it, we will either learn to live in harmony or perish together.
In my life, I struggled almost every day for acceptance, I could not find it or offer it until I met Maria, who was the first person in my life to accept me fully. I no longer had to hide, I could come out. I could be authentic. It was stirring to see Caitlyn Jenner, who had a much tougher road than I did, take the risk of authenticity. I like to think I took it as well. I imagine she saved her our own soul, her own life, I imagine she saved the lives of many others.
“Hi Jon, I am new to your blog, but I wanted to share with you that I have been reading your book “Saving Simon” nearing the end now. Just read the chapter where you decided to put Rocky down. I am inclined to ask why you could not have just kept them apart, the donkey`s and Rocky. Just seemed so unfair to me that you put down the animal that was being abused by another. It was after all Rocky`s home first! Disappointed, sorry! I think had it been me I would have figured out a plan. You wrote in detail that Rocky was thriving, gaining weight, dancing, full of spirit, seemed to be at peace and enjoying his life and the attention, but yet you still chose to let him go. I think my heart shattered into a million pieces. I am sorry to question you, I just love animals, as I sit here thinking about Rocky, my heart melts!“
Pam, message to me posted to Facebook Messenger, Friday, July 24.
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“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.“
Steve Jobs, Stanford University Commencement speech, 2005.
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It’s interesting – and surprising to me, but every message like the one Pam Sanders sent to me this morning has become a gift to me, an affirmation, a way of affirming my life-long struggle for identity and clarity and moral purpose.
To me, it is not comprehensible to write a letter like that to a stranger, a person you don’t know, about an animal you have never seen, on a farm you do not understand.
For one thing, I would not think it my business, my grandmother would have spanked me for such rudeness and presumption.
For another, I would never presume to tell someone else how or why to make such a painful and complex decision, one Maria and I made together and have not doubted for a second. I would hope I would simply feel sympathy.
The moral space around each one of us is sacred and very pesonal, the one thing we fully own is our own decisions, our own sense of right and wrong. Every unwanted intrusion is a violation, a form of the new cultural abuse. The world beyond us is different from me, though. The once sacred idea of minding one’s own business and respecting the decisions of others has collapsed under the technological tsunami of digital media.
An impressive woman named Helena wrote me a message recently expressing unease with my essay on the life of Caitlyn Jenner. She said she was raised as an Evangelical Christian, in a small town with very religious parents she loved dearly. She could not approve what Jenner had done, changing his identity from a man to a woman. The Bible as she understands it forbids it, she said. But she wanted to tell me that she respected me so much for writing in admiration of Jenner’s life, that even though her faith could not accept it, she believed that Jenner and other trans gender people had the right to live as they wish and must, that God made all of us as individuals and love us all – her, Jenner, me. She wishes her peace and happiness.
My own feelings were as sacred as hers, or for that matter, Jenner’s.
Helena wanted me to know that she enjoyed my blog and would never turn away from it because I made a decision that was different from hers. She did not believe in the idea of disagreement, she said, we were all correct in our own hearts and souls. That was what God intended. Right and wrong was the conceit of arrogant and self-righteous people, she said. Bless her, I say.
I loved the spirit of Helena’s message, unlike the self-serving one of Pam Sanders. Here was a woman struggling to accept something that was unacceptable in her faith, and yet cherishing the sanctity of the individual, and the sanctity of individual choice. What religion was supposed to be about. Just as Sanders’ message made my heart sink a bit, Helena’s lifted it up.
My wish for Pam is for her to make her own decisions, and live her own life as fully and meaningfully as possible. I do not seek her approval or her opinion, not does it matter much to me. Her letter is not about me, of course, or the pony. It is about herself, and what she would do. I did answer her and express concern for her melted heart. She seemed to hang on long enough to write me that message. I told her I had open heart surgery just a year ago, she needs to take care of her heart, it is expensive to fix them.
Don’t be sorry to question me, Pam, I am not God, I never believe I am always right. I am not in need of your sympathy, I am happy with most of my choices. My wish for you is the strength to look at yourself, and your theft of another person’s pain and story for your own emotional needs and interests. Do not exploit the hard life of poor blind Rocky, who was so far from thriving on the morning of his death. But how could you know this? You are just one more person wrapping yourself in the banner of loving animals while knowing nothing about them. Instead, you reveal your disconnection from people. You were not here after all, on that very cold winter morning, the vet begging us to spare old and trembling Rock another winter.
I am grateful it was not within your power to prolong his suffering, especially in the name of loving him.
I don’t think I have ever met a human being who doesn’t say they love animals, yet I have met so few human beings who seem to love people. How can this be?
My own philosophy about messages like this is simple. I do not argue my decisions or beliefs, surely not on Facebook, certainly not with strangers who insist they love animals but do not. Argument does no good, it does not change hearts or minds, it can become a toxic way of life and of looking at the world. It corrodes the soul of the arguers.
I sometimes share these messages – I get them every day – not to be harsh, but to remind others that identity and sense of self are precious, both can be destroyed in one blow or by a thousand cuts. You need not defend yourself, but you do need to protect yourself. I take every message like Pam’s as a magic pill to make me strong. I think that has worked for me, beyond my expectations.
The world is filled with hollow men and women who claim to practice moral conduct. They have not created a moral world.
Moral conduct, wrote the moral philosopher Hannah Arendt, depends upon the intercourse with man or women and themselves. We must not place ourselves in a position in which we would have to despise ourselves. Morally speaking, this should be enough not only to enable us to tell right from wrong but also to do right and avoid wrong.
It certainly, she wrote, is not a matter of concern with the other but with the self, not of meekness but of human dignity and even human pride. “The standard is neither the love of some neighbor nor self-love, [or a stranger on Facebook] but self-respect,” she wrote.
Both Pam’s message and Steve Job’s eloquent and instantly famous speech to those Stanford graduates spoke to one of the most significant ideas in life, at least to me: the quality of being a person as distinguished from being merely human.
It is simple, wrote Socrates, it has nothing to do with gifts or intelligence, the person possesses the almost automatic gift of thoughtfulness, the human simply exists.
Or put another way, in granting pardon or judgement or understanding, it is the person and not the crime that is forgiven; in rootless evil there is no actual person left one could ever pardon or forgive.
Pam, when you sit in judgement of the moral conduct of another person in such a thoughtless and unknowing way, you are not simply disagreeing with a decision, you are chipping away at what it means to be a person, a being free in this world to make our own moral decisions about how to live, the key to identity. This is, to me, as it was to Henry David Thoreau, a sacred right. I hope you stay on the blog, but if you do, please do not ever try to tell me what I should have done again. If you don’t care for me or my decisions, then all you need do is go away.
On all of the earth, this search for individual morality and choice is something unique to humans, no other living things have been grated this gift. I will not ever give it away out of convention or the conventional wisdom of the times. Or turn it over to strangers.
Helena understood it, so I think, did Jesus Christ. This is one of the most important issues of our time, raised countless times a day by miraculous and disturbing technologies that permit us to enter the private space of other human beings without thought or mandate, and seek to make them small and drown out their individualityl. I hope to always have the courage to follow my own heart and intuition, to stay big, and to never let the noise of other people’s opinions drown out my own inner voice.
This is the first of a series of posts I want to write about a young man I visited today at a remarkable place, Blue Star Equiculture. I believe his story is important, I think it speaks to way we treat one another, to the power of animals in our lives and the need to keep them among us. It speaks of a better way, the way the next generation might save the earth. I believe acceptance and a new consciousness of tolerance and harmony is emerging – in just a few weeks, Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change, the victory of the New York Carriage Horses over those who would banish them from the city, the removal of Confederate flags from government buildings, the ratification of personal freedom in marriage and commitment, the acceptance of good people like Caitlyn Jenner.
“When human beings fail to find their true place in this world,” wrote Pope Francis in Laudato Si, “they misunderstand themselves and end up acting against themselves: Not only has God given the earth to man, who must use it with respect for the original good purpose for which it was given, but, man too is God’s gift to man. He must therefore respect the natural and moral structure with which he has been endowed.”
And this is what is special about Mithra. He has found his true place in this world, he says, in his garden. He believes the earth is a gift to man, who must use it with respect for the purpose for which it was given. He respects the natural and moral structure with which he has been endowed.
I believe Mithra, who celebrates humility and simplicity, is the future, the way forward. So is Blue Star.
Mithra Kulatunga is 24 years old, he was born in the United States. When he was two his father, a farm manager, moved his family back to Sri Lanki where he spent the next 18 years running a farm in the rural gown of Matara. Mithra came back to the United States a few years ago to attend the University of Massachusetts and earn a degree in sustainable farming.
Last year, Mithra took a Blue Star course in agriculture and draft horses, and was mesmerized by the Blue Star idea. He loves the United States, but not the stress of life here or the runaway consumerism and corporatism. He has no wish for a life behind a desk, worrying about money for his retirement. He wants to work outdoors, inventing a new kind of sustainable farming. He hopes to return to Blue Star every year to tend his garden.
Mithra says he felt a powerful call from the horses there. They changed him, he said. When Paul Moshimer, the co-director of the farm, died two months ago, Mithra came to the farm and asked Pamela Moshimer Rickenbach if she needed help running the farm’s composting system and helping to create and expand their new garden. He was hired. Pamela did not imagine or expect so beautiful and mystical a garden.
Mithra works and sleeps in the shadow of the beautiful 400-year-old tree where Paul Moshimer took his own life, Mithra loves it there, he is pleased to work and sleep alongside of it.
Since Mithra came to Blue Star, he has spent four or five days a week living and sleeping in the garden as he builds it. The garden is spectacular now, it has grown to several acres, including rows and rows of flowers and vegetables. Mithra sleeps in a tent by the garden shed, he eats what he grows in the garden, shale and cucumber and shard, and cooks his food on a portable stove. He works all day and into the night, planting, seeding, plowing, weeding, pulling. Once a day, he goes into the farmhouse to eat or wash up.
Every morning, he wants down to the river and sits by the Peace Pole, the spiritual heart of the farm. Sometimes he sits there, sometimes he swims.
In the evening, at dusk, he pulls out a plank of wood and sits in a small lawn chair and writes at his makeshift desk. He has a journal of planting, a record of what he plants, how it grows, how big it gets, how healthy it is. His father told him that a real farmer, one worthy of respect, writes down a record of his garden, simple laborers just work the soil. So he writes faithfully.
In the morning, the sun rises over his tent around 6:30, when he gets up, eats breakfast and goes to work, watering, digging, planting. When he got the job, he bought $32 worth of seeds, the rest have been donated by friends of Blue Star or people in the town of Palmer, Massachusetts. Every day, people come to walk along the river, run with their dogs, see his garden. Several of the volunteers at Blue Star come by to help him.
Raised a Buddhist, Mithra talks eloquently of his spiritual life. He talks of the “suffering of desire” caused by the perpetual wanting more and bigger things, and of the “suffering of life,” the Buddhist acceptance of death and suffering as a part of life, not as an unimaginable and unpredictable shock. Suffering, he says, is both inevitable and predictable, it is an elemental part of the human experience.
In his life, he seeks Nirvana, a transcendent state in which there is neither suffering, desire, nor sense of self, and where people may be released from the effects of karma and the cycle of death and rebirth. Nirvana represents the final goal of Buddhism.
Mithra is important. He will not devote his life to making money, he says, but to learning how to farm, to helping to heal the land, and learning at Blue Star how to love people, animals and the earth. He hates no one, his time is not spent in argument and acquisition. His father is a farm manager, and he hopes to succeed him on the farm in Sri Lanka. He says his ambition is to treat the workers on the farm in the same way Blue Star has treated him. “I am supported here, I am part of a community, everyone has my back. When Pamela hired me, she said it didn’t matter if all I grew all summer was a rotten tomato, that would be fine. She just wanted me to try.”
That he says, has liberated him from fear and caution and dedicated him to his already spectacular garden. “I don’t have to worry about being fired,” he said, “I just have to do my work.” That idea has worked, perhaps beyond anyone’s imagination. Support is a great motivator, an idea that perished in the corporate takeover of much of American business.
But support is Blue Star idea. It rises from the conflict and argument that has hovered over the animal world like a storm. It is a new awakening, a movement to love people and animals, and to heal Mother Earth, as we are all called to do. The time for argument and delay and greed, say all of the wise and spiritual people of the world, is past. It is not enough to make more money and build more buildings. It is not acceptable to drive the animals out of our everyday life, Mithra knows we need them, they are part of all of it. We will either live in harmony or perish together.
Mithra is not alone at Blue Star, there are many like him, attracted to this vision of a more meaningful world and life, a life in community and acceptance, a life with animals, a life of re-connection to the earth and the natural world. This is important, so I’ll be writing about Mithra and his very magical garden this week. Thanks for reading about it.
It seems that hate is out this year. I believe that is the real reason the effort to ban the carriage horses has failed so surprisingly and spectacularly.
There was the President singing Amazing Grace, the sad and doomed campaign of Donald Trump, the Pope urging us to heal the planet, Caitlyn Jenner inspiring us to embrace acceptance.
Nobody told NYClass, the animal rights organization spearheading the effort to ban the New York Carriage Horses. They seem bent on being hateful as a strategy to banish the horses, they seem to be shooting themselves in the foot, one toe at a time. The definition of fanaticism. A fanatic is a person filled with excessive and single-minded zeal, especially for an extreme religious or political cause. By definition, they do not know when to quit. A rational politician does.
A few weeks ago, NYClass launched a half-million dollar leafleting campaign that said all of the carriage drivers were racists and homophobes and used hate speech to insult them. Thus, they claimed, they could not possibly be treating the horses well.
Many members of the public were outraged, and some members of the City Council thought this campaign was a grotesque overreach. Many people who gave a lot of money to NYClass thinking they were helping to save animals were surprised to learn where the money was really going. City Council members were offended by the idea that banishing the horses would end racism and homophobia in New York City.
IThe campaign against the carriage horses was a sure thing two years ago. The carriage trade was beleaguered and demoralized, the city’s new mayor, elected in a landslide, promised to ban the horses on his first day in office, he said it was his most urgent priority. Millionaire and billionaire real estate developers seeking the horse stables and a broad and wealthy coalition of so-called animal rights groups – the A.S.P.C.A., NYClass, The US Humane Society – had launched a massive and co-ordinated assault on the carriage trade that began in the mayoral race and had come to a head after the mayor’s inauguration.
No one in New York, including the carriage drivers, thought they had a chance.
Now the ban has failed, at least for this year, the animal rights demonstrators who have been harassing the carriage drives for years are turning in frustration on the mayor, accusing him of foot-dragging on his promise, and demanding that he find a way to shut down the carriage trade. One way or the other, he will regret his quite unholy and unfair alliance. In politics, be careful of which devils you get into bed with, they will eventually get around to eating you too.
NYClass (“we love animals, we hate people”) is proud to not learn from it’s mistakes, admit their failed strategy, or be humbled by it’s rather spectacular failure. This week, they launched a new campaign with a new spokesman, the rapper Russell Simmons, who quickly and publicly stuck both feet in his mouth by comparing the carriage trade to slavery and the holocaust. Simmons refused to apologize to shocked reporters, he did acknowledge that he thought the holocaust was a “horrific” event.
I am harboring the growing suspicion that the carriage trade has infiltrated NYClass, it seems almost inconceivable that they would seek to offend and alienate Jews and African-Americans in New York City, two powerful groups you might want on your side in a political battle. Up until today, the pamphlets accusing all of the carriage drivers of hate speech (imagine if a public figure accused all blacks of being criminals or all Jews of being greedy) were hands down the most offensive ads in the history of the animal rights movement, Simmons has upped the game.
In an interview later in the day, he said he was the leading person in the black community when it came to combating anti-semitism, a major surprise to Jewish community leaders. Reading his nearly incoherent comments about 100 billion animals birthed into suffering, I could only think of the Tracy Morgan character on 30 Rock, who might make the same speech. Perhaps he was not intending to make any sense, that would be the best outcome for him.
When Simmon’s comments exploded on social media, he refused to actually “fucking” apologize. Really, are these the people we want deciding the fate of animals in our world?
But then, if one looks back on the ugly campaign against the horses, it has been a dysfunctional circus all along. By all rights, the horses ought to be long gone. Two years ago, no one supported the carriage horses. Now, all three newspapers do, the City Council does, Central Labor Council does, the Central Park Conservancy does, the Working Families Party does, the Chamber of Commerce does. So do 64 per cent of the city’s residents, including every single age, racial and ethic group and gender in the city. Some campaign. NYClass and other groups have spent millions of dollars to rally almost everyone in the city behind the carriage trade.
How do you screw up a sure thing?
– By repeatedly and demonstrably lying about the treatment of the carriage horses, by inventing false or fantasized incidents of abuse, by falsely accusing various carriage drivers of crimes and violations that the police said did not occur, by ignoring the increasingly impassioned testimony of veterinarians, behaviorists, equine advocacy associations and horses lovers to the effect that the horses are healthy, content and well cared for.
– By spending tons of money in the wrong way in the wrong places. Countless millions of animals suffer real abuse, the animal rights groups spending so lavishly in New York to get rid of the well-cared for horses are not helping a single one.
– By proposing that the beautiful and iconic horses be replaced by ugly vintage electric cars to add to the insanely over-crowded and packed roads of Central park – cars, taxicabs, pedicabs, bicycles. And then claiming it is better for the environment to have $160,000 electric cars clogging the park than carriage horses, for whom the park was built.
– By adopting the the language, hyperbole and tactics of a hate group, NYClass has managed to take a genuine issue relating to the the well-being of the horses – how and where they might live in New York City – and turned it into a joke that would be pathetic if it were not so vicious and disturbing to the human beings involved.
The animal rights groups in the city are now obsessed with the carriage horses, It has become the runaway cause, the issue without end, it has taken on a life all of it’s own and without any reason. They have lost all perspective as well as any sense of civility or empathy. They seem to have failed to win a single New York resident to their cause this year, or a single veterinarian, or a single animal lover, or a single authority on the care and health of horses. Given that they are believed to have spent more than $4 million on marketers, publicists, blog and print advertising campaigns, robo-phone calls, pamphlets and leaflets and electric car prototypes in this campaign, that is an astounding failure.
Perhaps hate really is out this year.
At the core, the problem with the campaign to banish the horses is this: It is based on a single, provably false lie. The horses are not abused, they are being saved from the equine holocaust, not sent out to perish in it. Simmons does not seem to know that 155,000 horses without work or purpose were sent to slaughter in Canada and Mexico. The carriages horses are the safest horses in the United States. Like the mayor, he has never been to the horse stables in New York or talked with a single carriage driver. He seems to know absolutely nothing about horses.
The campaign against the carriage trade failed because it is out of sync with our times, it has caught the wrong wave, it is out of it’s time. Even the most expensive campaigns and polished blogs fail when the message is so poor it presumes the general public is too dumb to notice. It seems acceptance is breaking out all over the country, hate campaigns have never looked so empty.
NYClass has not proven or even made the case that a single horse was mistreated or abused in all of the time since the mayor took office nearly two years ago. The police, who work directly for the mayor, have not arrested or cited a single driver for a single violation of a single rule or regulation – hundreds protect the horses. Of the thousands of accusations of animal cruelty and abuse reported to the authorities, not a single one was made against a carriage driver.
We don’t have to hate people to love animals, we can love both and treat all living things with dignity and compassion. That is the message of our times. That is a cause to fight for in our increasingly fragmented and intense world. That is the message of the Pope, reverberating around the world.
The media in New York, which has bungled this story from the very beginning, insists this is a conflict between animal rights activists and labor unions. They have missed the point, or perhaps are uncomfortable with it. There are many people who believe in the rights of animals who do not believe that the carriage horses should be banned from the city. I am one of them, I hear from many more every day. New York City has hundreds of thousands of animal lovers, and most of them don’t believe the horses are being mistreated either, as the polling statistics clearly show.
We – that is, we animal lovers – are profoundly disturbed by the dishonesty and ugliness and abuse that underlies this campaign, and which is an affront to the idea of a democratic government protecting freedom and property rather than taking both away from innocent people. This campaign does not protect animals, it threatens to destroy many people and their ability to work.
It is not progressive in any way, it is ignorant, elitist and bigoted, filled with stereotypes and dehumanizing tactics and language.
Slavery was an abomination that destroyed the lives of millions of innocent people, so was the holocaust. How does an African-American man, a leader, a celebrity, equate the lives of 200 horses that every reputable person who has examined them has concluded are healthy and content and well-regulated, with that kind of suffering and slaughter?
How can any group that claims to speak for the rights of animals fail to even once address the real concerns about the future of the big horses in the city, or ever engage in a dialogue about the future of animals in urban areas? Their campaign has been pure hatred and hostility, there is really nothing else to it. And that, more than any other reason, is why it failed. Lies and distortions are hard to hang onto, the truth does want to be free.
Did slaves get five weeks of vacation and clean beds and regular health care and fresh food three times a day?
Did Jews in Europe have five government agencies regulate their care and health and work lives?
Is the carriage trade slaughtering horses day and night for no reason other than to remove them from the earth?
Can carriage drivers, most often immigrants or their children seeking to make an honest living, be compared to SS officers and thugs who murders millions of women and children in the cruelest imaginable ways? Does that advance the lives of animals, or protect the carriages?
And who, precisely, it is that would exterminate the horses in New York and send them out into peril? The carriage drivers or the people who claim to speak for their rights.
This is not a left-right issue, or a labor-animal rights issue. It is a right and wrong issue. The cruel campaign against the horses is wrong and unjust. The animal rights organizations seeking to speak for the future of animals ought to repudiate Mr. Simmons in precisely the same way Republicans are being asked to repudiate Donald Trump. And if they don’t, they are just as morally bankrupt.
Hatred is the coward’s revenge. Pope Francis said this in his encyclical: Any single act of cruelty towards any living thing, human or animal, is an affront to human decency and human dignity and will corrupt and poison the way we treat one another.
That is why the carriage ban failed, it was corrupted and poisoned by the very people who pursued it, it is an affront to human decency and human dignity.
— Note, in an earlier version, I said Julian Simmons, the name is Russell.
