One of the most amazing pieces about the police riot in St. Paul outside the Republican Convention is not just the aftermath, but the pre-math. The police spies infiltrated all those ‘dangerous’ groups – including vegans!
As a pretty-much-vegan in good standing, I am amazed and laughing and angry all at the same time. We are ‘planning’ on saving the globe from drowning in the methane given off by all those stinky cows. We also are about encouraging people to eat grains directly rather than feeding them to cattle first, thus making it possible to feed more folk, which will result in lowering the obesity of the planet.
Most of us, on our way to making the vegan choice, have thought a lot about our own position on a number of issues of the day, and so we do show up at protests, write letters, just plain write. Words are our weapon of choice by and large. We are not dangerous in a physical way, at the 99.999999% level.
But then, most of the folk the cops attacked were word people: journalists high on their list. This certainly changed my whole feeling about the Twin Cities – when their cops are that out of control, the region must not be as calm, liberal, open, wry as I had believed.
Most vegans work against irradiated food, rGbh in milk, genetically modified crops. So we are dangerous to the belief systems that want to make money from those non-natural ‘foods’.
The America I love supports that kind of dissent, absorbs it, changes, moves forward. Sure didn’t look like America in Minnesota that week.