A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [3]
We don't stop these atrocities, because we don't talk about them. We don't talk about them, because we don't think about them. We don't think about them, because they're too horrific to comprehend. As trauma expert Judith Herman writes, "The or dinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable".
As the ecological fabric of the natural world unravels around us, perhaps it is time that we begin to speak of the unspeakable, and to listen to that which we have deemed unbearable. A grenade rolls across the floor. Look. It won't go away.
Here's what I've heard about your typical slaughterhouse.
The room sounds for all the world like a factory. You hear the clang of steam in pipes and the hits of its release, the clank of steel on steel at chains pull taut, the whirr of rolling wheels on metal runners, all punctuated every thirty seconds or so bythe pop of the stunner.
The rooms are always humid, and smell of grease as much as blood. The walls are often pale, the floor usually concrete. I have a picture from a slaughterhouse that will forever be etched in my mind. No matter how I try to look elsewhere, my eyes return to the newly painted chute that leads in from outside, not only because of the chutes contents, but because the color—electric blue—contrasts almost painfully with the drabness of the rest of the room.
Inside the chute, facing a blank wall, stands a steer. Until the last moment he does not seem to notice when a worker places a steam-driven stunner at the ridge of his forehead. I do not know what the steer feels in those last moments, or what he thinks. The pressure of contact triggers the stunner, which shoots a re tractable bolt into the brain of the steer. The steer falls, some times stunned, sometimes dead, sometimes screaming, and another worker climbs down to attach a chain to the creature's hind leg. Task completed, he nods, and the first worker—the one who applied the stunner—pushes a black button. There's the whine of a hoist, and the steer dangles from a suspended rail, blood dripping red to join the coagulating river on the floor.
The steer sways as wheels roll along the rail, causing the fall ing blood to describe a sinusoidal curve on the way to another worker, who slits his throat. There is barely time to follow his path before the chute door opens and another animal is pushed in. There goes the stunner again, the hoist, metal, steam, the grind of meshing gears. It happens again and again, like clock work, every half-minute.
We live in a world of make-believe. Think of it as a little game— the only problem being that the repercussions are real. Bang! Bang! You're dead—only the other person doesn't get up. My father, in order to rationalize his behavior, had to live in a world of make-believe. He had to make us believe that the beatings and rapes made sense, that all was as it should, and must, be. Now, it will be obvious to everyone that my fathers game of make-believe was far from fun—it was destructive. My father rewrote the script on a day-to-day basis, thereby making every thing right—he created the reality that he required in order to continue his behavior.
In attempting to describe the world in make-believe terms, we have forgotten what is real and what isn't. We pretend the world is silent, whereas in reality it is filled with conversations. We pretend we are not animals, whereas in reality the laws of ecology apply as much to us as the rest of "God's Creation." We pretend we're at the top of a great chain of being, although evolution is nonhierarchical.
Here's what I think: it's a sham. It's a giant game of make- believe. We pretend that animals feel no pain, and that we have no ethical responsibility toward them. But how do we know? We pretend