Guilt guilt guilt

Mom and I do a fair amount of shopping while I’m here. We go to Gabe’s each visit--it’s like a cheaper version of TJ Maxx. Today I got a lovely green coat. I chose it based on how it fit, the length of the coat, how it looked, the price, the colour. Only after mom bought it for me--one of my Christmas presents--did I realise what I had done. It’s a down coat--and I managed to suppress in my memory the photo I’d seen on Facebook of a goose completely plucked--a nudie goose, as it were. I didn’t click on the “don’t buy down” article to learn how it is that down feathers are produced on an industrial scale to stock stores with down coats, jackets, pillows, blankets. From the meat trade, I know anything produced on an industrial scale involving living animals requires cruelty. The efficiency required to be economic--to produce a cheap down coat (or pork chops or chicken mcnuggets)--means no regard at all for the pain the animal will feel as it is quickly separated from its body parts.

This puts me in mind of Al Gore’s film, an Inconvenient Truth. Climate change is happening because people would rather not acknowledge the truth of their complicity in the crime of the century--destroying our one perfect nest. Don’t let the fires of California or the floods of Texas or the droughts of Africa interfere with our right to live as self indulgently as we like.
12-22