September 11

Like many of us, I spent a good part of the day staring. I stayed on the phone with my mom for an hour. I felt helpless. I wasn’t hungry. The violence.

Fast forward one week. Flipping through TV channels, I did a double take at a cow being hoisted by a crane…to a dump truck. She was alive.

I’d happened across a show about farming. I should have kept scrolling. That documentary showed violence I can only label as obscene. It was ok, though, uncensored, mid-afternoon, because the violence was only to animals. We needed them for food.

The internet was young at that time, but already it knew a quite a bit about making food out of animals. And violence. It knew enough to teach me the word vegan.

I didn’t want that violence in my life. I stopped eating animals. It wasn’t hard.