Killing Fields

A few days ago I clicked on a link to a YouTube video of Sarah Palin giving an interview at a turkey farm. She had gone to the farm in her role as governor of Alaska to "pardon" a turkey. After the pardoning, she remained to answer some questions from the accompanying reporters, her words coming out in that syncopated way we've come to know so well, describing the brutal pace of the campaign trail and segueing at the end to a statement of how thankful the governor was and how she enjoyed participating in a turkey pardoning.

Nothing unusual there, except that in the background a man is slaughtering turkeys. Viewers can't see the slitting of the turkey's throat, but they can see the man pushing the turkey in a metal cone to drain the blood, which is caught by a large trough below. The turkey struggles a bit during this exercise. Meanwhile, the governor keeps talking, with the blood flowing in the background.

One version of this video by KTUU NBC Anchorage, Alaska, has now been viewed over a million times. Of course, the video is fascinating because the typical political patter of the governor, who is holding a styrofoam cup of coffee in her hand, is so incongruous with the scene behind her: the struggling turkeys that haven't been pardoned from appearing on Americans' dining tables this week, the blood draining from their necks, and the nonchalant blood-spattered farm hand. People are grossed out by the scene and laugh at the governor's obliviousness to how she appears in this setting.

I, too, had a chuckle over this video, and then I began thinking. I grew up in the country where people slaughtered their meat. I plucked the feathers of many dead chickens in my childhood and adulthood, helping to prepare the birds for the family freezer. (Though the smell of the singed feathers and death and blood always turned me off chicken for at least a couple of weeks after the slaughtering.) My father has raised cattle all his life; that cattle went to local butchers to be slaughtered; the fine grass-fed meat graced our table every day. I have watched family members slaughter pigs. As a child, I watched family members skin rabbits and squirrels. Now, for health reasons, my husband is vegetarian, and I no longer eat red meat (except when I visit my parents). But I know the process of getting meat from the farm to the table. Nothing in the background of that video of Governor Palin's interview on the turkey farm is new to me.

But I can tell from many responses to this video, that the slaughter distresses many viewers. Most people are totally removed from that meat-production process. The chicken one picks up from the freezer at Publix or Kroger is so devoid of the life it once lived that it may as well be a muffin to most shoppers; they think so little of that life and of the bloody process that brought the pale, scentless, boneless breast to its plastic and styrofoam enclosure.

And so I wondered:

What if above every freezer in every supermarket, videos played scenes of animals being slaughtered? Or--even worse--of animals being kept in the very tight and miserable quarters of factory farms before being led to a slaughter totally devoid of the kind of respect afforded those chickens and cows on my family's farms. When I was a child, I remember my father's killing and skinning a squirrel and then placing the squirrel on the kitchen counter before preparing it for a meal. The denuded body of the squirrel was still jerking, and I stood there, mesmerized by the sight of this dead thing continuing to show the movement of life. I vaguely remember laughing in my childish horror and fascination at the scene. When my father saw me, he made me leave the room. I realized then that not only was my father wanting to protect me from the ugliness of death; he was also protecting the squirrel, which deserved dignity in that death. This was a lesson that has remained with me all my life: meat is sacred. Just as life is sacred. And unlike Governor Palin, who told the reporters she was fine with where she was standing for the interview, my father would have asked those reporters to move to another location. He would have been cognizant of the life draining away behind him, and he would have respected that life by allowing it dignity in death. He would not have wanted the farm hand distracted from his sacred duty by turning away from it to the glare of the cameras. I know that not every person who grew up on a farm has this kind of respect for the animals he or she has killed or has led to slaughter--but my father did, and that's the lesson I learned, an important lesson for the world, I think.

More importantly, what if those millions of video viewers gave equal attention to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people in the world? What if behind every television appearance of a politician the background revealed the consequences of that politician's decisions? Sarah Palin pardoned only one turkey; the rest of those turkeys were not pardoned, and this video so clearly communicates to us the consequences of that decision. What if behind every CIA operative who participated, rolled video footage of the enemy combatant being tortured? What if behind every politician who has cheered on the war in Iraq, rolled video footage of children dying in the streets, of mothers wailing at funerals, of blasted bodies, bloody entrails? What if behind every politician who has sneered at the need for universal health care, rolled footage of the long lines of suffering people in emergency rooms and the death side scenes of people who couldn't afford adequate care? What if, behind every president and leader who sought war with another nation, rolled footage of their soldiers falling in battle, close-ups where viewers can see the light going out of those young eyes, can hear the death rattle in the throats? Would we care then? Would we demand different and better leadership?

There are many killing fields in this world. What if we paid more attention to those?