Here's another piece, published in the
New York Times yesterday:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/us/vermont-college-euthanizes-one-ox-spares-another.htmlI've been watching this story play out as well, especially as it's my Alma Mater. I graduated from Green Mountain College a few years back now, and got to know Bill and Lou personally while I was there. Having grown up on a bit of a funny farm where we had cows in the summer and meat all the rest of the year, much of which came from cows with names (though admittedly names that reflected their purpose in our place such as Tony T-Bone and Bozo Burgers), I found myself on the side of the fence commending Ceridwen Farm for their initial decision to put the team down and consume the meat in the dining hall, which would have been in the form of ground beef so that the expected toughness wouldn't be a major issue. I thought they went about making their initial decision in a respectable manner, allowing the community to be involved, even waiting for classes to resume earlier this fall before making the decision so that all enrolled students could be aware of the question at hand and thus contribute their voices to the conversation.
That being said, what struck me most discouragingly about the whole ordeal is how it (combined in time and spirit with the election season) speaks to our society's and culture's over-zealousness to jump to polar stands and take up an argument rather than a conversation. The decision, I feel, should have come down to a local farm and the place that it is a part of. What it came down to in the end was another case of s/he who yells loudest winning. The incivility in the comment strands on GMC's Facebook page among other places, coming from both sides of the argument, was appalling. It even stemmed so far as threats being made to local butcher shops in the Poultney area.
The question I've had to take away from all of this to wrestle with is: Why are we so often so quick to vilify the "other," to seemingly shed any sense of his or her personhood, to prove ourselves right no matter the cost?
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