WALTER EDMUND BOND (37096013)

11/15/2012 10:04:48 AM

Animal People

I come from a long line of ‘Animal people’. My late grandmother Gwen was the quintessential Cat lady, dedicating in her senior years an entire house for her cats! Though she could no longer stay there because of age the cats enjoyed it, furniture and all. My father also is an Animal person and taught me from an early age that “people that hunt Animals for sport are evil”. My mother is a Wolf women, she even has a wolf tattoo on her ankle professing such. She currently has two Wolves in Alaska where she resides and when I was a teenager she kept Timber Wolves until the city forced her to get them out of city limits.  I myself am an Animal person. Having made very real friendships with Cats, Dogs, Bunnies, Turkeys, Chickens, Lamas, Bulls, Goats, Snakes and so very very many others.

However, for all the closeness to Animals with which I was raised Veganism never entered the picture. My parents, like most people failed to see the link between cruelty to ‘food’ Animals and ‘pets’. Or better stated, they as most people did not see the hypocrisy of loving one while eating the other. Humans have an incredible capacity to compartmentalize the pain and suffering of those outside of our circle of compassion. Historically, our callousness to the harm of sentient life follows a thousand shades of otherness. Each being as meaningless and irrelevant as any other one we choose. Race, sex, gender, nationality, age, religion, politics and species all lend to the artifices we use to justify exploitation, deviance and rape. I was this way as well, loving Animals with one hand and eating their dead bodies with the other. So prevalent was this barrier in my mind that even as a young man I took a job building slaughterhouses. pork production was the euphemism. the truth was the systematic and mechanized murder of thousands and thousands of pigs. Animals frightened to the point of hysteria and defecation. A concentration camp of death that makes the Nazis look like child’s play. It was within those walls that I saw the worst sites I have ever seen. I smelled so much blood that it’s taste would literally stick in my throat and I met the most insensitive and prime evil people that our society has to offer. and then I went Vegan.

That was over 16 years ago now but I still remember the difference that choice made. Like much of my life extreme circumstances affected my choices. Veganism was no exception. Shortly before I quit my job as a millwright for slaughterhouse manufacturers, I witnessed plant workers beating a Hog to death while my co workers cheered on the carnage. I quit eating meat on the spot and within a few weeks could no longer stomach my job. On the day I went Vegan I was working for a temporary agency. I had no stable home and no idea where to get, or how to cook posh Vegan food. I would eat dry naked salads of iceberg lettuce and tell myself that it was good. The salad wasn’t good but the feeling of relief I got from eating it was. For the first time I was able to be honest with myself about dead bodies, cow secretions and the calcified menstruation cycles of birds (meat, dairy and eggs). It is impossible to see our bias behaviors objectively whilst we are still engaged in them and deriving pleasure from them. Much like an addict that thinks they understand the nature of addiction only to find after getting off the junk that they were so often blinded and baffled by behaviors that all other non users around them could easily see.

So began my Vegan journey. I quickly learned that not all Vegans are Animal people. There are as many different reasons for Veganism as there are Vegans. For some people it appeals to their health concerns. It is a fact that a Vegan diet  not only supports good health but is a far superior diet in combating many diseases that plague the common consumer. There are those that are Vegan for ethical reasons, these are people that are usually highly educated and articulate. There are Vegans that view their diets as extensions of other liberation struggles such as eco feminists or Veganarchists. In the end the reasons for choosing Vegan do not make the positive ramifications of this compassionate lifestyle any more or less definitive. But when it comes to Animal Liberation, what is needed is more Animal people. The Animals need less technology, infrastructure, less roads, less factories and less humans, all of which are built and weaned off of their blood and bones. Animals need activists to do whatever it may take to save them. Because Animals and the Earth are not commodities, they are beings! they are not ‘natural resources’ that is just corporate doublespeak for the Air, Fire, Water, Earth, every living creature, every tree and plant, Forrest, Ocean, Lake, Stream, Mountain, Valley and element thereof.

The use and abuse of the World for industry and consumerism is theft on a grand scale. Theft so that a small segment of the human race can lead lives of excess, greed and apathy. It is the most tyrannical abuse of all life to date and the least democratic. When was the last election held where the 500 billionaires of planet Earth proposed to even the human inhabitants if they are cool with the rape and murder of the Animals and the Ecosystems that support them? Or how about the hoarding of the all wealth and economy worldwide so that they can collectively have far more money than has even been coined and minted? I must have missed that election. The answer does not lay in redistribution of wealth either. The death of the planet so that everybody has what they want is still unacceptable for every other life form besides humans.

Consumerism and the industrial technoplex that feeds it are a juggernaut, more ravenous than fire, more deadly than a creeping pestilence! Many are the professionals with large academic credentials who will give you lectures of doubletalk about a segment of the problem. They focus on the minutia to dazzle you with their mental dexterity. Political posturers of every ilk and stripe will give you a bunch of theoretics and party lines that if everyone would adhere too all would be well with the world.

Religionists will take you on long mental journeys into the past and get you fixated on invisible men in the sky that hate homosexuals and any other form of fun sex. In hopes that you forget about the train wreck tracks that we are on and instead get lost in ancient books and stories.

I’m not going to bullshit you. no one has the answers to the riddle of utopia. Anyone that claims to is deluded or lying. Here then is the only important riddle to solve: if we can’t change the whole world than why fight?……….Hold on, I’m getting ahead of myself.

It’s an inherently apathetic generation that thinks in terms of pure profitability and then applies this to revolutionary liberation struggles. Freedom fighters of yesteryear fought because of love of their principles. They fought because the fight was the proper response to the  travesty they saw all around them. they fought because justice means more than peace! Today everyone has been mindfucked by advertising into thinking that everything must be done with the inclination of some form of personal payoff, some emotional profit margin. Instant results must be perceived or all is kaput. It’s this flawed mentality that applies totalistic terms to liberation. ‘With every action we are fighting all oppression’, this is not plausible it’s pretentious. And it’s really only necessary to motivate professors and pussies (not the good kind of pussy but the coward kind). For even today you will find that those who put their back into their beliefs , those that are willing to do the hard work and make the necessary sacrifices do so from their passion and will not their textbooks and teachers.

Before we can save THE Animals we need to save AN Animal, this is real life. And in the real world activism and struggling for liberation is not altogether different from any other huge task you might have. you don’t sit around day after day and theorize about your job, or how your going to make it through your work week, at the expense of the job itself. You show up, you work, opportunities present themselves. You learn and grow only after you show up to work. Conversely people that get all revved up for Animal Lib or Environmental conferences and workshops are more like job fair people than Animal people. Instead of looking for work, they network about work! That is not activism, it’s visiting booths of people talking about activism. Quit playing liberatory games and just get to work! There is plenty to be done much work and real world activism that the Animal people, Vegan people and Earth People need to do. And if we forge ahead with real world activism the fracking, drilling, vivisecting, factory farming, flesh eating and secretion sucking continues unabated. While the internet activist recedes into the world of the mind, the mentality of the autistic activist, the Earth dies! While we stare at people on podiums saying words we agree with, Animals get injected with meth or oven cleaner.  Everywhere you look humans are destroying and harming, stop them! Everywhere you look the Earth is further decimated by Humanity, defend her now!

Animal Liberation, Whatever It May Take!

Regards,

Walter Bond

ALF POW

 

To send funds to Walter Bond in prison, please visit his support website for numerous ways you can do this (check, cash, money order, paypal, and western union):  https://supportwalter.org/SW/index.php/donate/

Walter Bond continuously adds books and magazines to his amazon.com wishlist.  If you buy a book from the wishlist, it automatically disappears from the list.  If you buy something on the list from another vendor, please let us know and we will take it off his wishlist, so he does not get duplicate gifts.  View this list:  http://amzn.com/w/W7P09VVVUSYT or just search for Walter Bond on the wishlist section of amazon.com.

Here is his mailing address:

Walter Bond

37096-013

USP Marion CMU

PO Box 1000

Marion IL 62959