"I'll Have a Veggie Burger, Hold the Violence"

I don't know if it's this conversation that caused it, but I committed murder in my dream 2 nights ago. It was truly awful, the act itself wasn't the main event, I think it was kind of an accident but then I hid the body and had to go through this whole thing of convincing myself that confessing would be the best thing to do.

But I do tend to agree with you that anything not done in love is a form of violence. I know it sounds extreme but it doesn't really have to be, considering that love is the "om" baseline of the universe. Not exactly hard to tap into. I think this principle of non-violence is called ahisma in Hindu, and it extends to the concept of vegetarianism. In the last few years that I have been obtaining my animal products, milk and eggs included, from local farmers who raise animals appropriately, I have developed a real distaste for the general assumption in our culture that vegetarianism is by definition less violent than omnivorism. Shrink wrapped inside a Morningstar (Kellogg) veggie burger is a genetically modified soy product sowed as a uni-crop robbing it's home farm of any biodiversity, literally killing all Monarch butterflies who dare to rest there along the way, then processed in a slurry with irradiated spices and monosodium glutamate and shipped off to your local grocer up to 2000 miles away. But the average householder can knock the box into their cart and feel more virtuous, more generous of spirit, more evolved than a meat-eater. Let's not stack up the Monarch against the chicken, because that is not the point. The point is, we are not separate from any of it, and so we can do violence to all of it. To the gene, to the farmland, to the vegetable matter itself which lived a noble life, and though it may not (or may) be a sentient being, it is goes against the grain (so to speak) to subject it to a manufacturing process that creates a product that none of our ancestors would have dreamed of, let alone eaten.

And so I guess I'm saying, I don't think we can get non-violence on the cheap.

(Please don't mistake this for a tirade against vegetarianism. We're on to something totally different here.)