Avian flu. Mad cow disease. Soon we’re not going to be able to eat any meat products without running the risk of getting some awful thing. It’s not a new thing to get crossover diseases from livestock, that’s been happening for as long as livestock farming has occured. Read Guns, Germs, And Steel by Jared Diamond and you’ll learn all about it.
And it seems like everybody is developing some kind of mental health problems. Maybe I’m only noticing because I have one and so of course like a newly diagnosed patient I’m diagnosing all these other people. But really and truly, I feel like mental health problems are increasing in the population. And in a roundabout way I will connect this to the little sick chickens.
See, I think the whole world can’t keep going on the way it is. I don’t know how it can change for the better, but something has to happen. It seems almost as if the cows and chickens are on strike. They don’t want to be meat anymore, or something. I mean, feeding them their own kind is the sort of idiot move that humans would think of.
But it feels like all of the world is going on strike, even our very own brains. I know there’s a lot of research being done on brain chemicals being the reason for mental health issues. However I think part of it is also just the world we live in, people go crazy because they’re living a life that’s getting unhealthy for them in some way or another. We don’t eat properly, or we’re putting too much stress on ourselves. I think part of it is that humanity needs to evolve, or we have evolved, but we don’t know what it means for ourselves yet. Maybe we have to live life totally differently, I don’t know. But something has changed.
The interesting thing is that as much as things have changed, they’re also balancing themselves out with older things from our history as humans. Take gender for instance. There used to be alternative models of gender in all kinds of different tribes of people. Then it turned into that damn boy or girl thing and we buggered up the continuum.
But then you have queers in my generation, where gender is so much more fluid. Most of the queers I know are bisexual or transgendered, or don’t really cling to a label. It’s pretty cool, because I don’t feel like a lesbian, I feel genderqueer. And I think as time goes on, those rigid definitions of who’s a boy and who’s a girl will start blurring again.
But then you know, there are those people who get scared by that. And this is where the little sick chickens come back into play, because like little sick chickens, there’s also this weird backlash beginning to form to try and take us backwards. Back to when “real” men were macho assholes and women didn’t have the right to abortion. Back to when life was pretty fucking boring.
I hate that, the people who want to make the human experience boring and homogenous. Bleh.
So in short, more fun, more play, don’t make animals eat themselves, let yourself be what you’re needing to be, and don’t get caught up in hegemonic delusions of whose’s a better human.