Down here in our sleepy city of
Salem, where folks
are used to dozing through legislative sessions and their
state government jobs, the opening of an “adult shop” on
south Commercial
Street has woken some of the
citizenry into full-on protest mode. Marching with signs,
parking lot vigils, fervent community meetings—the whole bit.
Apparently all was OK when adult entertainment kept to the bad
side of town, but not when
smut invaded the squeaky-clean south
Salem
suburbs.
Not wanting to be left out of a
good old-fashioned moralistic crusade, but lacking sufficient
fervor to get on the adult store bandwagon, I turned to
thinking about other businesses in the area—where I live and
shop—that peddle depravity. Look, if we’re going to foist the
morality police on this single porn establishment, the
virtuous national
guard should be called out on the many vile merchants I
easily identified.
Their garish signs glow day and
night, beckoning casual passers-by to sample their sickly
wares. It’s well known that what they sell so shamelessly is
terribly harmful, yet powerful forces of avarice and desire
keep their wares easily available to children and adults
alike. Sure, what they’re doing is legal. But does that make
it right?
I’m speaking, of course, about
fast-food restaurants—those sordid purveyors of charred animal
carcasses.
Wherever they are located, we
find meat addicts drawn to them like alcoholics to a spiked
punchbowl. Discarded hamburger wrappers litter the street for
blocks around. Customers never leave permanently satiated;
these flesh peddlers know that in a few hours, you’ll be
craving more.
It starts innocently enough with
a single patty. Then you’re back, wanting a double. Soon,
you’re begging for the hard stuff—a bacon cheeseburger,
cancerous heterocyclic amines and artery-clogging cholesterol
all wrapped up in a deceptively pretty package.
I really don’t care what
meat-eaters do in their own homes. I just wish they wouldn’t
parade their perversion out in public where we vegetarians
have to see it. If fast-food restaurants aren’t going to hold
to the moral high road of tofu and tempeh, then their vileness
must be geographically contained—in a burnt-flesh district.
Lancaster
Drive
(Salem’s
equivalent of Sandy
Boulevard) sounds fine to me.
Vegetarians of
Oregon, we can’t
remain silent any longer. A skinned animal is more obscene
than a naked body. Honk your horns! Make your voices heard! If
we don’t protest the open peddling of meat on our streets,
what kind of state are we going to end up living
in?
Gosh, maybe an Oregon where
people take responsibility for their behavior, so long as no
one else is harmed, and don’t try to force others to act or
think as they do. An
Oregon where we
trust that children are strong enough to be exposed to
temptations because the lives their parents lead provide
better guidance than episodic self-righteous outbursts. An
Oregon where we
can accept some imperfection in others if we have not yet
become perfect ourselves.
Heavens, who would want a state
like
that?
