Bad People Do Bad Things ~ Tim Gier

[Carolyn Bailey]

I had someone tell me today that they’d seen a horrific thing on TV the other day. It seems that some “native” people were doing all sorts of horrible things to some primates, vicious cruel things in fact. But, these were “bad” people, or so I was told, and the “good natives” didn’t do those sorts of things.

Good people don’t do bad things. That makes sense. Bad people do bad things, that’s sorta what makes ‘em bad, right?

Well, no, not exactly. We all like to think of ourselves as good people. So when we’re confronted with the reality of how nonhumans are treated in our society, we react by saying things such as “Well I always try to buy organic when I can,” or, “I stopped buying regular eggs a long time ago, now I only buy cage free eggs” or even “I’d never support a farm that mistreated it’s animals like that, there’s no reason to be cruel.” What do any of these kinds of statements mean?

Not much. Do you see what we do? We see ourselves as good people, so the things we do, and support, can’t be bad. Bad people do bad things. Since we’re good people, the things we do must be good. So, we convince ourselves that

when we buy organic food, that somehow that food isn’t like all the rest. We kid ourselves into thinking that the chickens who live 30,000 to a cramped and filthy shed are so much better off without their cages.
We think that by saying that we wouldn’t support cruel factory farms that therefore we actually aren’t. It’s all just wishful thinking. We want to be good, to be the ones wearing the white hats, standing up for truth and
justice, and in most cases we are. We pay our taxes, we support our schools, we’re kind to our neighbors. We do good things. We like to think that all the things we do are good. So when we see pictures of others doing things we know are wrong, we say that they are bad people, doing bad things, things which we would never do. But we do bad things, and calling ourselves good people in spite of it won’t change that fact. It’s a crime that some people somewhere are doing horribly cruel things to primates. But
we’re supporting infinitely more horrible cruelty every day as we live the good life, while millions go to slaughter, far from the TV cameras, far from accusing eyes who would call us “bad”, if they could only see what hell on earth we’ve wrought.

Go vegan.

Tim's blog may be read at: http://timgier.com/