The other morning, as I was getting ready to take a shower, there was a rather significant-looking spider in the tub. Not a daddy longlegs or a baby something-or-other. One that looked like it could bite. And yet no matter how dangerous it might or might not have been, I couldn't bring myself either to kill it or to let it go down the drain. I did the whole "glass and sheet of cardboard" thing, and took it outside and let it drop into the yard.
I say this not to congratulate myself on my nonviolence. (One of my brothers would call me "holier-than-thou", but what he didn't understand was that I was just being me.) But this morning after hearing the news, I started to cry like a baby, because I simply don't understand. Why kill anyone, anything, larger than, say, a mosquito or fly? How does anyone believe that any being on this earth doesn't deserve to be here? Much less dozens or hundreds or thousands? And yet clearly our construct is actively based on that belief. This is not about today, or yesterday, or two decades ago, or two hundred years ago. It is about virtually all of human recorded history, people (most often men it seems) killing other people in all kinds of contexts. In school, I tried to understand. Like a good student, I memorized dates of wars, names of generals, political movements. I tried to accept that such-and-such an outcome had been good and another was bad, and I tried to accept that even though I might not be a warlike person, this was humanity being humanity, and that I was the odd one out. I was the one "not facing reality". I finally do not believe this anymore. It took almost 70 years and untold numbers of world wars and national and international tragedies to get to this point.
And at long last, I'm thinking as much or more about the rights of the animal and nature kingdoms. Up until recently, I have never been a vegetarian for long. I felt I needed meat and fish for protein, and honestly relied entirely too much on so-called "cheap" fast food because of my limited income. I think that the rise in fast food prices during the pandemic started to wean me off of such meals. And now, most recently, I am living with people who are vegetarian. For the first time in my life, I have had at most one meal of fish or meat a week (on top of a weekly tuna salad sandwich, which I'm still rather addicted to.) I had already started to cook less meat from scratch, but I am increasingly finding I don't crave it at all, or can only eat a small amount when I do eat it. If I ever return to a situation where I can completely make my own dietary choices, I'm certain I will continue to eat a mostly vegetarian diet, only eating meat from a source that takes great loving care with the animals. At this point, I see too close a correspondence between our cavalier attitudes toward the lives of animals and the lives of other humans. And of course this extends to the land, the water, and the air.
In terms of the spider-in-the-tub, there is no way that its life was less valuable than my perceived comfort. I hope I let it loose into a place and situation where it had a better chance to fully live its lifespan.
