Cesar Chavez & Vegetarianism

[Guest guest]

http://www.vegan.com/current/ac033098.html

 

By Alka Chandna

 

Brothers and sisters! Long live the memory and legacy of Cesar Chavez! Long

live the United Farm Workers! Today we honor a giant among men. Today we

honor a man who has been called a Hero of our Times; a Gandhi of the fields;

a Moses figure for his people; a champion of social justice; a prophet for

the world's farm workers.

 

The story of how Cesar Chavez rose out of the Depression-era fields of

California to become one of America's greatest forces in the labor and civil

rights movements is the stuff of legends. The agribusiness forces of this,

our Golden State, are rooted in a history of racist, slave-like labor

conditions. No union of farm workers had ever survived the heavy hand of

agribusiness.

 

In 1965, Chavez addressed a crowd of Chicano workers saying, " We are engaged

in a struggle for the freedom and dignity which poverty denies us. " It was a

difficult struggle. The agents of agribusiness beat protesters, threatened

members of the National Farm Workers Association with dogs, showered them

with obscenities, sprayed them with pesticides and fired buckshot through

picket signs. Through all of this, Chavez insisted on Gandhian nonviolence

saying, " Nonviolence is the only way to peace and justice. "

 

Cesar Chavez understood that all oppressions are rooted in the same poisoned

soil of violence and prejudice. And so, he saw that the abuse and

maltreatment of animals is also an injustice. Because there is so much to

say about Cesar Chavez, one point that is often ignored is that he was a

vegetarian. In a communication to Eric Mills of the Oakland-based group,

Action for Animals, Chavez wrote: " Kindness and compassion towards all

living things is a mark of a civilized society. Racism, economic deprival,

dog fighting and cockfighting, bullfighting and rodeos are all cut from the

same defective fabric: violence. Only when we have become nonviolent towards

all life will we have learned to live well ourselves. "

 

The struggle for animal rights and the vision of a nonviolent, vegetarian

world are but two elements within a broad worldwide movement that seeks the

resumption of individual responsibility in sociopolitical matters and

demands a collective respect for other people, for animals, and for the

planet that sustains us all.

 

And in recognizing that all oppressions are connected, we know that the

purchase of table grapes has contributed to maltreatment of our fellow human

beings, creating a legacy of pain and misery, death for farm workers, and an

earth despoiled by pesticides.

 

So too, the animal agribusinesses have declared war on so much that we

value: our fellow human beings, the animals, and our planet.

 

 

 

 

 

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