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September 11, 2008

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By Mickey Z. (about the author) Page 2 of 4 page(s)

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Normal means 15 million animals are slaughtered each day although up to 14 times as many people could be fed by using the same land currently reserved for livestock grazing.

Normal means one billion earthlings live on the equivalent of one US dollar a day while my neighborhood is teeming with 99 cents stores. But these establishments aren’t offering Third Worlders subsistence for 24 hours. No, they’re where folks like me can purchase cheap goods—probably assembled in China by pre-teen girls. If you need an earpiece for your coltan-containing cell phone, it’s all yours for one dollar and eight cents…after tax.

Normal means taking off your shoes at the airport, being shot at by overzealous cops, and getting priced out of the neighborhoods you grew up in…but never having to walk more than two blocks to find your nearest Starbuck’s. Wait, did I say “walk”? I meant “drive,” of course. Walking: how Third World of me.

Whether we realize it or not, thanks to corporate scientists, normal also means that when a human gene is introduced to a sheep’s mammary glands to produce a protein called alpha-1-antitrypsin, that sheep is no longer a mere sheep…but rather, it’s a legally patented commodity known as a “mammalian cell bioreactor.” Not a sheep, not a lamb, but a mammalian cell bioreactor. Try it out: Mary had a little mammalian cell bioreactor. Sound normal to you?

Normal means two indistinguishable political parties, corporations that never pay taxes, and yellow ribbons as far as the eye can see.

On a normal day, more than 100 plant or animal species go extinct. On a normal day, 45,000 human beings die of starvation.

Normal means slavery—on so many levels—like this:

In the most remote regions of Brazil, slave labor is employed to cut down grand swaths of the precious rain forest to make room to grow eucalyptus which is then burned by male slaves (who exploit the body, mind, and spirit of female slaves forced into prostitution) to make charcoal for the steel mills of Brazil where the poorest of the poor toil for wages that do not sustain them so that steel can be shipped to a General Motors plant in Mexico (GM is the second largest employer south of the border) where the poorest of the poor suffer maquiladora conditions so these automobile parts can then be shipped to a GM plant in the U.S. (roughly 50 percent of what we call “trade” consists of business transactions between branches of the same transnational corporation) where even the poorest of the poor proudly take on imposing debt to possess a car “made in the U.S.A.” so they can clog the highways that were paved over countless eco-systems, filling the air with noxious pollution as they make their way to the drive-through window of an anti-union fast food restaurant that purchased the beef of slaughtered cattle that once grazed on land cleared by male slaves who exploited the body, mind, and spirit of female slaves in the most remote regions of Brazil.

That is some of what we accept as normal…

Normal means land mines, factory farming, and the death penalty
It means racial profiling and the shooting of abortion doctors
Normal means gay bashing and it means “illegal” is a noun
It means pesticide, homicide, suicide, genocide
Normal means the WTO, the FBI, CIA, NSA, and KKK
GMO, HMO, Guantanamo.
It means banned books, the war on drugs, and the PATRIOT Act
Normal means: “have it your way” and “just do it”
Global warming, water boarding, People magazine
It means no cod in Cape Cod and soon: no ice at the North Pole
Normal means strip malls; normal means strip mining
It means pre-emptive strikes and humanitarian bombing
It means shock and awe
Normal means if you kill someone while wearing a uniform, you get a parade. Do it in gang colors and you get the electric chair.
Normal means we live in a society programmed and conditioned to lust for revenge instead of unite for peace and justice

After 9/11, normal also came to mean a perpetual war on terror. You know what? Maybe a war on terror is precisely what we need.

No, I'm not declaring public allegiance to the current jihad against a tactic (which is in actuality a war against terrorist attacks not perpetrated by the US or its allies). Instead, I'm thinking of another meaning entirely for our new favorite, post-9/11 word: "terror."

Author Don Lutz has written that terror is "what one feels when being kidnapped or raped."

He goes on to list other terrifying examples:

"Terror is what poor people worldwide feel when approached by uniformed, armed men; what animals feel in research laboratories; what people feel when their families are faced with starvation; what a child feels when an adult starts to hit; what millions of families feel when they hear planes overhead; what fish feel when hooked in the mouth; what people feel under threat of having loved ones tortured or killed; what forest dwellers feel when the loggers come in to clear-cut; what people feel when they are threatened with invasion; and what animals feel at slaughterhouses."

You wanna wage war against terror, why not find a worthy adversary? No shady FBI stings, unconstitutional wire tapping, or panic-inducing color-coded warnings that conveniently pop up at the most politically expedient intervals. The variety of terror I just described is genuine and endemic and it is the real problem.

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Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net.

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