My guess is that meat sales will be on the rise for a few years. I hear that a January 20th Executive Order will require every federal employee to purchase a weekly minimum of Trump Steaks. If a state wants to receive federal assistance during anticipated monthly climate-induced floods or droughts or fires, their employees will be required to participate in the minimum steak program as well.
Trump's new health-care plan will depend on shorter lifespans, due primarily to an increase in cardiac-related deaths from heavy meat consumption and more deaths from food poisoning due to the repeal of food safety rules.
The hoped-for rise in premature deaths will be aided by another Executive Order requiring that elementary school children carry guns to school.
The New Normal is Not OK
Not everything will be accomplished by laws and regulations. Manipulation of cultural norms through the mass media has already begun -- Trump met with leading media representatives in his golden palace this week to tell them what to cover and how to cover it. "A f--king firing squad," is how one attendee characterized it. And of course there is @realDonaldTrump's Twitter account and its sixteen million followers. Check those characters out -- you'll see the new norm.
These are days when Latino children are bullied, Muslim women are shoved off sidewalks, and African-Americans might want to stay inside for their own safety. Overweight? Disabled? Gay? Jewish? Female? Keep a low profile and pray that any trouble is only verbal.
Aggression is now admirable. Testosterone is king. Civility and gentleness are dead.
There will be no vegetarians appointed to Trump's new Cabinet. Under the new administration, a humane diet (or even a vaguely healthy one) will become an object of scorn, along with other "politically correct" pursuits like polite conversation, fact-based news, and words with more than three syllables (examples of the upper limit include disaster, amazing, terrific, and Mexican).
No, these are not gentle days in America: November, 2016.
Happy Thanksgiving
November has never been a gentle time for turkeys. More than forty-six million of the creatures are killed every single Thanksgiving, after spending short, miserable lives crammed together in massive warehouses, usually with no ventilation and no windows.
I generally re-post my popular Thanksgiving blog about vegetarianism each year, but I thought that this year, we needed a call to action:
Are you looking for ways to protest the new president-elect and the ugliness he has ushered in? How about engaging in radical gentleness? Our society may be in for a lot of chaos and violence in the coming years, so why not rebel by adopting a kinder lifestyle? Go vegetarian!
And in case you want to read the story of my vegetarian journey and learn about the benefits of such a lifestyle, here is a link to my traditional Thanksgiving post: Seriously? This is Your Thanksgiving Post??