(Tomasito photo. 2009)There is a village--just a wide spot in the road really--maybe eight miles northeast of here called "Valley Center".
Nothing much there as I said--a gas station and maybe a bar and a little market and some farm land.
There are a few orchards and in one of them there is a grisly training exercise being conducted on live animals--pigs according to the newspaper--which I feel very bad about.
There is a huge Marine base also near here and the training has to do with them.
Pigs are being tranquilized and grievously wounded amid chaotic sounds of battle so medical personnel will have the opportunity to literally experience the carnage, the spilled blood and guts caused by war and receive hands-on and real training with real blood being spilled and real bodies being counted--though the bodies and the blood are not human.
Nearby farmers have complained about the noise. That's why the information was in the paper.
The people conducting the training have promised to turn the volume down but the slaughter will continue because "they are breaking no county laws".
War is a terrible thing--"no picnic" as they say--and military training is necessary--and the pigs will be slaughtered and eaten anyway, so why not get some more mileage out of their inevitable death?
I don't know, friends, but it doesn't seem right to me.
Life is so... well, what word should I use? Life is all there is. No life, no nothing.
Pigs are NOT humans, but cruelty is cruelty and meanness is meanness and the more we are trained to be thoughtless about the consequences of casual killing the worse for us.
These marines will return to civilian life some day not so far in the future and the line between pigs in an orchard in California and the enemy and us ordinary people might be just a little bit more blurred for them.
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