Training Kills Pigs

(Tomasito photo. 2009)

There is something happening near here--Escondido, California,where we live-- which I am almost ashamed to write about, but which needs more light, perhaps.

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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Empire's End

(Tomasito photo 2008)

Empire's End

"There was nothing left––no churches, no heretics, no books, no pictures, no city. There was only the sun beating down on the mud bricks and broken walls, and all the religion, trade, warfare, art, money, government and civilization had turned to dust."

(Paul Theroux: Riding the Iron Rooster)

"The Endless Round"---It has happened before...

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Walt's Wisdom

Death Valley, CA. (Tanya Photo 2008)

Walt's Wisdom

"I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-washed babe, and am not contained between my hat and my boots." (Walt Whitman)

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The Circle of Life

Try this music. It is one of my favorites and a star in the crown of all the artists, musicians and enablers of the Lion King production. The Endless Round indeed.

It's ALIVE

It's ALIVE!

“The world does not consist of inanimate materials and living things; everything is living and everything can therefore be of help or cause harm”

Ritual of the Wind
Jamake Highwater


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The Word

Escondido River. (Tomasito photo, 2009)

Remember: "Mother Nature always has the last word."


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US Army

Illustrator Flagg's Most Famous Poster

There is a recruiter's office in easy walking distance of our apartment and the other day I stopped to chat a bit with the recruiter--a very polite and soft-spoken California man who has been in the army many years--almost retirement age, he said.

He gave me the above recruiting poster--after all these years, still a potent ad!

This recruiter's office is in a small "mallito"-- we call it-- with a grocery store and a beauty salon and a fast-food place and like that.

You may wonder what in the world an enlistment poster is doing in a blog called "ahimsaland"--but everything is part of "ahimsa"--and there is, more than ever, a need for good soldiers.

And besides, in this depressed economy, who else is hiring kids just out of high school?

There will always be a need, I suppose, for police and warriors--there are messy, hard and dangerous duties to perform even in peaceful times--and it is still true that there is a time for all things. Everything in this world comes and goes--peace as well as war.

So I thought it would be appropriate even here in this peaceful ahimsaland blog on the eve of the Fourth of July, to honor the voluntary military caste of The United States of America.

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