There is something intimate and powerful about a woman riding bareback on a pony. I do not ride horses, sheepherding is much more my speed, but there is real love and connection between Maria and Chloe, they seem to understand one another in ways that are new, even to us. Ponies are different from donkeys.
What did I learn this weekend? I learned the importance of listening.
I learned that we are losing our ability to connect with one another as human beings or stand in their shoes. I learned once more that the Internet is a breeding ground for anger and social disconnection as well as connection and community. It is increasingly a medium of outrage and judgment. I learned that many people have lost touch with the very idea of empathy and compassion and do not, in fact, know how to practice either.
I learned that our wonderful love of animals, like almost any unchecked thing involving emotion and perspective, can become a force for harm as well as good.
I learned we are losing perspective about our own world, placing animals too far above the welfare and well-being of people, or even of the earth itself. That we are forgetting that animals and people are both entitled to the most basic rights of decency and dignity. We cannot love one while hating the other, we cannot ease the suffering of animals while ignoring the suffering of human beings.
I learned that technology is sometimes incapable of helping us see the mysterious nature of human beings and their relation to things, and that it often addresses one wrong only to create another.
I learned that outrage in the digital world is an end unto itself, apart from any just cause or rational purpose.
I learned something about who I am. And who I am not.
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I had an important week, I did not know when I wrote about Cecil and Dr. Walter Palmer from Minnesota that I would strike so deep a chord, I found the mix of ideology, theology, animals and compassion a perfect mix for me, right up my alley. I also didn’t know that when I wrote about Internet Mob Justice, that I didn’t have to ponder the mob, the mob came to me.
My messages broke all kinds of records for hate, anger, disconnection, outrage and the most astounding kinds of rationalizations and mis-information. I never imagined that a column suggesting we might be more compassionate to people who behave in ways we hate could possibly be viewed as heretic and offensive.
The messaging goes on still, from Friday to Sunday, I wrote three pieces about compassion and Internet justice, got more than 1,000 messages and had three different pieces go viral. Wow. That is a lot of response. Many death threats, some assaults on my computing system.
All in all, it was nothing but a gift to me, there are moments in a writer’s life where you are given the opportunity to decide who you really are, where you stand, what you believe, how you will stand in your own truth. It felt good and strong.
A defining time for me, and I have been writing online almost from it’s inception. It doesn’t make me wise, of course, just older. What stands out in all of this dialogue, all of these messages, all of this anger?
First, outrage. I think social media has spawned a vast community of outrage addicts, great hordes of the outraged who are continuously and vocally outraged at many different things. The left is outraged about the right, of course, the right is outraged about the left. Republicans are outraged at President Obama, he is outraged at them. Farmers are outraged at animal rights activists, animal rights activists are outraged at just about everyone.
Dr. Palmer is a great gift to outrage, he could easily have been created for it. He is arrogant, cruel, oblivious and seemingly without character or morals or sympathy. For this reason, countless people from all over have seen fit to deprive him of dignity or sympathy, they have terrorized his family, destroyed his business, invaded his privacy, stolen his personal and financial data, threatened his patients and employes and driven him into hiding.
The message I heard all weekend was, good, he deserved all that and more.
Over the course of several days, hundreds, if not thousands, of people told me that this punishment was not nearly good enough, he must be pursued to the end. More than 100 people in the last 24 hours said that what he did to Cecil the lion should be done to him. Nobody over the weekend even mentioned the slaughtered people in Charleston, the young women butchered in New Mexico, the nine people shot in Brooklyn. No one I conferred with could name a single person killed in any of the massacres of recent weeks.
Everyone knew every single detail of Dr. Palmer’s life – including many that were not true – and of Cecil’s death.
When I suggested that killing Dr. Palmer in the same way he killed Cecil suggested to me that the killers would be no better than he was, people took offense. Nobody wanted to hear it. “I’d change your message,” one person advised, “people might be more receptive.”
The internet is, of course, a great digital outrage machine. There, things to be outraged about come in a steady stream, they are enthusiastically shared and tweeted and fumed about, and it we don’t ever have to even look the targets in the eye. It only takes a couple of seconds to express outrage, it is free, you don’t have to think about it or ever see or grasp the consequences. Battalions of trolls are ready to invade anyone’s personal life and destroy it. They took Dr. Palmer’s life and computing and social media world apart in minutes.
What stands out from the messages?
Several people said I erred in suggesting Jesus Christ would not want to destroy Dr. Palmer’s life and the lives of his wife and children. “Jesus marched on the Temple,” one woman said, “he loved animals and would have hated Palmer and tried to destroy him.” She said the same was true for Gandhi. Many people agreed with her, cheered her on.
This surprised me, I have read just about every book written about Jesus in recent years. I had trouble believing that people were using Jesus Christ as a rational for hatred and vengeance. I found this dispiriting. I didn’t foresee that anyone would seriously use Jesus or Gandhi as a hiding place and screen for hating and pummeling people. I hope Jesus Christ is not, in fact, looking down on them.
Two or three people said they were disappointed to see I was writing about Cecil and Dr. Palmer at all, “I have been reading your blog for a long time, and I don’t understand why you are writing about this. I enjoy the photographs and stories about your dogs and donkeys.”
“Oh, God,” said Maria, “I hope she isn’t trying to tell you what to write.” She was, I said, she was. I told her if she thought my blog was only about cute animals and flowers, she had best move along.
Another person said she had looked up the meaning of “mob” online (“a crowd bent on or engaged in lawless violence”) and decided there was no Internet mob, I was imagining it, no such thing could possibly exist. Someone told me that I was wrong in being disturbed by the anger and rage shown by online mobs, she had been posting about Dr. Palmer for days and had seen no anger and no rage anywhere.
I was surprised at how few people read my post at, one after the other kept posting stories and comments about how awful Dr. Palmer was, how many horrid things he had done. It was a long series of declarations, there were few questions, little back-and-forth. People seemed in a trance, they couldn’t stop denouncing Dr. Palmer, even though no one was defending him. It felt like a fever to me. My piece had nothing, really, to do with all of that. “There is nothing you can do to him that would be too awful,” wrote Martha, “he should be disemboweled, just like the old days. That would send a message.” Yes, for sure.
“I read the first paragraph of your post,” said another, “and I disagree with you. Dr. Palmer deserves whatever he gets. So do his children. Children are responsible for the sins of the parents.” I hope this woman does not have children, if she does, I hope they never read her post.
It was an intense experience. I resolved to reply to as many of the posts as I could. By this morning, more than 1,500 messages had been posted in response to the pieces I wrote. There was considerable agreement, a lot of praise, but the overwhelming tone was great anger at my suggestion that Dr. Palmer might be treated as a human being worthy of dignity, no matter what he did in Zimbabwe. To me, that would honor the spirit of animals.
It was a remarkable dialogue about compassion and justice, about the boundaries of mercy and understanding, about the challenges and dangers raised by new technologies for communicating. Compassion, I argued, is hard, it means standing in the shoes of another. It means showing empathy for people we don’t like, not just people. we do. I didn’t run across too many people who wanted to do that.
Compassion is not the ethos of Facebook and Twitter. In killing Cecil, Palmer seems to have forfeited the basic rights given to any killer, even the killers of children: to confront their accusers, to maintain their privacy, to get their day in court, be protected from vigilante mobs and prosecutors.
I will confess that there was a moment when I had some Atticus Finch fantasies:
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” I wrote something like that, but the people posting were not nearly as impressed with me as the crowd down South was with Atticus: “You are mean and arrogant,” wrote Teresa, “I hate you and will never read your work again.”
For just a moment, until one person told me I was worse than Hitler and urged me to shut up and go die, I had fantasies of standing tall against the mob. I fantasized that people would say, “oh yes, of course, mobs are not good, we have no right to destroy this human being, even if he did kill a lion and is not a good man.”
This did not happen. Words only go so far, I guess, I felt that I was failing to find the right ones.
I resolved not only to stand firm, but to stay steady, as Atticus urged Scout to do when she felt enveloped by the anger and hatred around her: “You just hold your head high and keep those fists down. No matter what anybody says to you, don’t you let ‘em get your goat. Try fighting with your head for a change.”
So I did that, I tried fighting with my head for a change, I answered several hundred posts. By the end of the weekend I was so addled I started calling Red Julius and wasn’t sure where I lived. Julius was a long dead sweet Lab of mine, Red does remind of him, but still…
. When I first wrote one of the pieces, I got Palmer’s first name wrong, I called him “Arthur” instead of Walter and this was pointed out to me for days as proof that I didn’t need to be listened to, that I am lazy and uncaring, even though the mistake was corrected almost instantly.
And this, too, is the nature of the Internet. Humans are not allowed to make mistakes, mistakes can never be forgiven.
A lot of amateur policemen and women out there, a lot of judges, editors, prosecutors and juries. No one seems troubled by these non-digital issues like due process, or the awful specter of vast mobs of people using new technology to kill a person’s identity and sense of self long before the police or the courts could possible get around to it.
Some stories are compellng to write about for all kinds of different reason. For me, this story is important because it tells me who I am, what I believe, where I want to stand in the world. I do not wish to stand with any mob, ever. And movements are not mobs. Perhaps it was Atticus Finch who taught me that, I read his story a hundred times when I was a kid. In the hours or arguments over the weekend.
Atticus said many wise things, one of the wisest was that the one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience. We all have to figure out who we are and who we wish to be.
I told the women who suggested I soften my opinions on this issue in order to draw more support that I was good with my conscience, I was grateful to be on the side of perspective and compassion. I am proud to be trying to do what Atticus tried to do: look the mob in the eye (I can’t really see them either) and say this is what I believe, and I am going to stand here and stick with it. I did that. But it was a conceit to think that I am like Atticus or that this conflict is like a movie.
Mobs are frightening forces of primal nature, I am not sure I ever heard of anyone reasoning with one successfully. The very definition of a mob is that it exists beyond reason, just like a thunderstorm.
The truth it, is was much easier for me than it was for Atticus. (I wish I looked like Gregory Peck and had that voice.) I could be strong and clear from my Apple computer in my study, just as all those outraged people can be brave and punishing from their own living rooms. You, sir, are no Atticus Finch.
I do not think I changed many, if any minds, and no one changed mine. That is perhaps the nature of the time. But the people who messaged me did get me to think, and I hope I did the same for them. I’m not sure one can ask for anything more in the new world of remote communicating. When the media and digital worlds collide, humanity falters and fades, we live in the realm of social disconnection.
I felt I was standing with my idea of God all weekend, and that felt very good to me.
You know, the one who said in Peter: “Finally, all of you, be like-minded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble.”
That one. I don’t think he would be good with hacking into the cellphones of Walter Palmer’s children and putting their most personal messages online for all the world to look at and jeer.
While it is still fresh in my mind, I entered the world of the subconscious this morning, a powerful experience. It is the place we enter in sleep and childhood, we carry it with us forever, it is the everlasting realm of my soul, the true and ever present self. All the magic and terror of childhood are there, everything that shaped me.
I was taken back there this morning. I died, I think, and was born again.
Maria and I had a meeting to go to today, it was early and a couple of hours away. It was an important meeting, but a painful one, we are confronting some issues in our lives having to do with money and security, and I have been worried about it, money and security always brings me back to the age of five, to a place of helplessness and confusion, I sometimes feel like a five-year-old boy with a farm and a book contract and a blog and lots of bills to pay.
I was sitting at my computer preparing to post a photo, as I always do early in the morning when my fingers began to tremble, and I broke out into a cold sweat, and it felt as if my stomach had dropped down into the ground, I felt nauseous. I felt as if I had left my own body and was flying through the air, under the power of something other than myself.
I called out to Maria and I said something was wrong, she came running. What is it?, she asked. “It is my mind, I am feeling an overwhelming amount of fear, I am back in Providence.” I remember Maria coming into the room, and she was talking to me, but I could not hear her, my eyes were closed, my heart was racing, I was soaked in sweat, it was as if I was underwater, in a bath tub, I heard sounds but could not make them out, it was as if she was speaking in slow motion.
It was not my heart or something I ate, or a stroke. She looked worried, it must have looked like that. I knew what it was right away, it was much more painful than anything I felt in heart surgery. Yet it was familiar, after my surgery, after they stopped my heart, I felt I had gone to a different place, I had traveled outside of my body.
This morning, I also felt as if I left my body and was standing outside of Summit Avenue Elementary school, a place of horrors for me, afraid to go inside. I was afraid of so many things. Of wetting my bed, of having an accident, of being beaten up, of my teachers, of getting a polio or measles shot, of my father, of undressing for the gym, of climbing ropes or doing push-ups, of the other kids in the dressing room, the playground, the school room.
I was afraid of so many things, I can never know if any of these fears were real, or lived only in my subconscious. Seven years of analysis could not tell me.
On such days, I pretended to go to school, but did not. I hid in the bushes, even in the middle of winter, I wandered the neighborhood, visited the library – they gave me refuge there, I hid in the back of the Quaker Meeting House, I was also welcome there, I walked for miles and miles, hid in a cemetery crypt, and when school was due to end, I’d make my way back, often numb from the cold and from hunger, and come home.
I did this often, but this was a different world. No one seemed to notice or care where I was, my teaches and my parents never asked me, not once in a hundred missing days. I was caught once or twice and scolded, and got some detentions, boys will be boys, after all. I lived in a daze of terror and paralysis. I learned nothing, had no friends and hid myself from everyone.
I was back there this morning, every detail of it was fresh and vivid, even the smells of a dirty New England industrial winter. I had died, I was sure.
How one comes to accept that life follows death is an individual choice, a way of looking at the world. It is, for me, the key to understanding to much of life. Joseph Campbell says that only birth can conquer death – the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body’s spirit, there must be a continuous recurrence of birth to wash away the relentless recurrences of death. In our own lives and dreams, in the world around us.
“For it is by means of our own victories,” writes Campbell, “if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought; doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace then is a snare, war is a snare, change is a snare; permanence a snare.”
When our time is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified and resurrected; dismembered totally, and then be reborn.
So that was my journey this morning, my experience, it has left me spent and bewildered. And grateful. My life is a victory, I am regenerated. I left myself this morning, I felt death closing in, I unleashed the dreadful things that live inside of me. It was a death of self, suddenly released. There is nothing more healing for me than to tell my story, that has saved my life more than once. And here I am, with my partner and love, my work, my dogs and donkeys, my blog and camera.
It is my resurrection, a recurrence of birth.
Each morning now, Fate runs through the meadow, sometimes she hops for joy, or in excitement, if a chipmunk squeaks, or a mice runs for cover, or a rabbit darts into a hole. She disappears for a few minutes, then pops up here, or there. It has become a beautiful part of our day, a ritual, Fate loves every second of life.
I know some people who urge everyone they know to buy a farm, the idea being a farm is the perfect place to live in our frantic, techno-driven and expensive lives. Farms have become an almost mythic fantasy for tired people who hate their jobs, miss nature and want to live near animals. Most Americans – 90 per cent now – do not live anywhere near a farm, and that is both by choice and for reasons of economic opportunity, the availability of culture, and convenience.
The truth is, a farm is not for everybody, there are as many good reasons not to live on one as there are to buy one.
I saw one of these reasons this afternoon, when the sheep took off on Red and he and Fate took off after them driving up the hill where Maria was walking with her back turned. Normally, the sheep will split around a human, this time, they were being pressured and were running up a dirt path.They stampeded, two of them plowed right into Maria just above the knees and sent her flying through the air.
It was a frightening to thing to see, and a painful landing for her, but she is okay. I though for sure we would end up driving to the hospital rather than the movie (Mr. Holmes) that we planned to see in Williamstown. (We loved the movie, and Maria is hardy, like Willa Cather characters.)
It is easy to forget that farms, always presented as idyllic places stuffed with animals we love (I do some of the presenting) can be dangerous, uncomfortable and expensive places. They are not nearly for everyone. Some days, they are not for me.
Any real farmer knows this, they all chuckle at romantic portrayals of farm life.
And I am no farmer, I am a writer with a farm.You will never hear a real farmer say everyone should come to the country and buy a farm, most of them would love to live where you are.
I have been to the hospital three times since I bought a farm, and had many more trips to emergency clinics and my medicine cabinet, which is full of gauze, antibiotics, arm and leg wraps. I have had a number of near death experiences, two involving falls during bitterly cold winter storms, one when I was knocked down by a Swiss Steer, was chased by rabid raccoons and skunks, fractured my kneecap in a fall on the ice. I was hurt when aggressive rams came after me, and bowled over several times when Rose or some other border collie drove a flock of sheep into me.
A barn cat up the hill bit me 30 times in my right arm, which swelled up like a big red balloon.
I’ve been buried by snow avalanches off of barns, fallen off of haystacks, had giant splinters pulled out of my hands, sliced open my hands on barbed wire, slid down slippery hills on my butt, been lost in the woods more than once, fallen twice out of hay piles in the upper floors of barns. I got frostbitten in three toes and two fingers when a donkey dragged me up the hill in -20 temperatures while I tried to give her a shot in her butt for an infection. I slid off a roof twice trying to clear big snow drifts. I am no hero, but I have learned to be very careful.
I always have band-aids around and tetanus shots are not optional for me.
I don’t share these stories to complain, I Iove my life and I love my farm, but I’m not going to fantasize or emotionalize about life on a farm. They are easy to buy and hard to sell. They are dirty and fragile. It is good to be thoughtful about fantasies.
I put up a lot of pretty photos of farms and neat animals, but it is also important to point out that farms are generally not pretty or easy, and rarely sylvan or idyllic. Those are what I call Vermont calendar farms, you will not see many of them where I live.
If you live on a farm for any length of time, you will get hurt. And you will shovel a lot of manure, brushhog a lot of ground, repair a lot of holes in various roofs, fix a lot of latches and fences. I can’t climb on rooftops any more, so I am always urging Maria to be careful. She is strong and agile but sometimes, I think, a bit careless, even macho. She denies this.
Livestock like sheep and donkeys and ponies are large and sometimes unpredictable. Even the most docile animals can get spooked or confused, it is important to remember that they are animals, not cute versions of people. You have to stay alert, I am almost knocked down every day during sheepherding lessons. I shudder to even think about what breaking a leg or tearing a ligament would mean around here. The odds are good.
I have learned how to stay alert and move fast.
Maria was very lucky today, she got hit hard and knocked far, she could easily have broken a bone or a ligament. We love the animals here and trust them, but both of us are daydreamers, we have our heads up our asses half the time. I am apt to be thinking of a blog post or photo and she is always thinking of the art she is going to make. Maria lives out of her head, and if she sees an interesting rock or twig or flower, she pulls out her cell phone camera and forgets the world around her. Vigilance is not a natural state for either of us.
I tried to give her a safety lecture today, but she laughed and blew me off.
We both agreed we had to be careful, especially around a farm with a work-mad puppy who has not yet learned to stay still for too long or give me her full attention. We are working on it. Don’t let anybody tell you that farms are for everyone. They are great things, for some people – for me and Maria – but don’t let anyone tell you it is something we all must do.
When it’s a good fit, you will know it. If you like to have movies and restaurants and snow plows for hire nearby, stay where you are, and count your blessings.
