Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve surely seen the Sarah Palin turkey slaughter video making its way around the wide web of the world. If there is one thing the web is good at, it’s generating vague, undefined controversies like this one.
It is unclear exactly what people think is wrong with this video. Turkeys get slaughtered every single day in places just like the one Sarah Palin happened to be visiting that day, and they get slaughtered in precisely the manner shown. Some people seem to think that the reason it’s funny is because it makes her look a bit oblivious, as if she just wasn’t aware of what was going on behind her, and that if she had been aware, she surely would have stopped the interview and moved it someplace else.
Except that, of course, she knew exactly what was going on behind her. The problem isn’t that she was oblivious to it, the problem is that she didn’t see anything wrong with it. The fellow in the background doing the slaughtering, in her mind, might just as well have been pruning a tree for all she cared about those animals losing their lives.
It’s odd that so many people who will, next Thursday, eat a slaughtered turkey just like the ones in the video, seem to think that there’s something wrong with slaughtering the turkeys in this video, or that at least there’s something wrong with showing it on camera. The disconnection between the food people eat and where that food comes from could not be made more clear by this strange dichotomy.
And lest it be forgotten, the reason she was even at the slaughterhouse that day was to carry out the absurd American tradition of ‘pardoning’ a turkey. The very notion of doing such a thing is a sign that, somewhere deep in the American consciousness, there is a stirring of the faintest guilt, a glimmer of a basic awareness that there is something incongruous about a society’s morals when it has the means to live on a plant-based diet, but chooses to slaughter and ingest sentient creatures anyway.
One of the strangest of American traditions is this turkey pardoning which goes on at the white house every year and which also apparently goes on in many states. It is doubtful that most Americans would have any idea of where this tradition of turkey pardoning even comes from, since most probably couldn’t care any less about it either way. But if that’s the case, then why does the government keep doing it? Why do the press cover it every year as a photo op?
Another story making the rounds today is this one about a man who was asked to remove his turban in a building and was given as a reason “this is the United States.” But the story is not about rampant nationalism, it is about the western tradition that it is somehow impolite for men to wear hats of any kind indoors. We have all seen men taking off their hats when going inside a building, or when saying the pledge of allegiance or when singing the national anthem. Why a man wearing a hat during one of these occasions is rude or disrespectful, I cannot say. In fact, can any of us? Can you? Rude to whom? To what? In the turban incident, the building the man was going into had a chapel in it, and so he was told that if he wore his turban (or a hat of any kind) indoors it would be rude to the almighty deity.
But it is a very odd tradition indeed that hats on men are somehow offensive if worn in certain specific situations, while hats on women, according to the same tradition, are acceptable anytime. Does anyone who actually believes that a head covering can be rude know why that is? Can it be explained why a normal article of clothing is somehow horribly discourteous in one situation but not in another?
The modern American Thanksgiving meal is centered around a deceased turkey. And yet the very first thanksgiving, the one we are supposed to be commemorating every year, had much more to do with corn than with anything else. Do most Americans celebrating thanksgiving every year ever wonder why they’re supposed to eat a turkey that day? Or do they just accept it as tradition and not even for a second contemplate eating anything else? I suspect so.
Our culture is rife with these traditions that actually don’t go back very far, but are extremely ingrained. But even if they did go back millennia or eons, few people today even know or care where they come from, and most people don’t bother to stop and wonder why they still do them. And so men feel compelled to take off their hats indoors for no good reason, and people eat turkeys and pigs and so on for no good reason, and humanity goes through its daily, weekly, monthly and yearly routines without a single thought about why things happen to be the way they are, and certain traditions, which should have been dropped long ago, are perpetuated by a kind of brute force apathy.
Those turkeys being slaughtered within feet of the governor of Alaska were bred and then killed for the tradition of eating turkey at thanksgiving, a tradition that there is no actual reason to perpetuate. If thanksgiving truly is a celebration of the harvest, then we should eat whatever we want from our harvest. We should eat what we, personally, want to eat, and what is good that year, not what someone else tells us we should.
The turban-wearing man from North Carolina comes from a culture, which has as a tradition, the idea that men are supposed to wear turbans, and that, in certain situations, taking one’s turban off would be disrespectful. How wonderfully ironic, then, that he would stumble upon a group of people who would tell him that, in their tradition, keeping it on was discourteous, even blasphemous. Two opposing traditions, total opposites, and neither one with any foundation in necessity or reason or logic. And the entire incident is a product of those traditions and nothing more.
Will we ever really take a good long look at ourselves and our traditions and question them? Or will we continue to believe in things just for the sake of believing them, and doing them just for the sake of doing them? For the sake of the animals we eat, for the sake of getting along with each other, for the sake of basic logic and reason, I hope we do.