(Sorry, tommyxvx.)

WHAT VANDAL WOULD DO SUCH A THING?!

I’m glad I wasn’t immediately deleted like some of my friends have been, but this is the first time my blog has been censored and it’s very upsetting to me. I can’t believe that Tumblr would participate in censorship of its users. I can’t believe I live in a country where censorship is still possible, even.

Um.

I was born February 9th, 1988 in Schenectady, NY, where I have lived my entire life. I was created by two high school dropout youths while they were on a roadtrip across the country. My father, David, and my mother, Paula, had been together since they were in the 9th grade, give or take, and they were not planning on having me, but did anyway. They were both mentally ill alcoholics, but had jobs. I grew up in poor neighborhoods around semi-frequent parties, alcohol, and domestic violence. My mother smoked while pregnant with me and it was only a couple of years before it was discovered that I had severe asthma. I was enrolled in a private Catholic school because my mother thought “private” meant “better education” and my evangelical Roman Catholic grandmother offered to pay for it. I was molested by my female babysitter an unknown amount of times when I was three or four.

I was a good student my entire life, but the Catholic school I spent pre-K until the 6th grade in was very traumatic. I was chubby, liked books, said weird things, ate food out of garbage cans, and wore cheap shoes, so I was made fun of and bullied a lot, verbally and physically, by students and even teachers. The entire school was run by an all-female staff that blatantly favored the girl students. It was so evident and bad that by the 6th grade, not a single male student had re-enrolled and they had to combine the 5th and 6th grade classes. I was very close with my father’s parents and would escape to their house almost every weekend. My grandfather died of a heart problem due to smoking when I was in the 3rd grade. I saw my first therapist when I was nine. I was on medicine for stress-induced stomachaches and began strangling myself with fan cords and hitting myself in the head with dictionaries around that time. I hated my life and didn’t understand why God ignored all my prayers.

I lived in a real house for a long time (still in a bad area) because my grandmother bought us one with a pool using inheritance money. She held it over our heads the entire time and every summer lead to drunken violence, huge parties with my parents’ crack-addicted biker buddies, cops being called, and physical altercations between my parents and their friends. I was scared a lot of the time. My parents hit me and pulled my hair a lot. I was being called a “cocksucker”, among other terrible things, by them at a very young age. They gave birth to three more kids: Kyle (21), Amber (18), and Bryce (15?). None of them got it as bad as I did. They enjoyed the authoritative aspect of parenting more than anything else, it seemed. I wasn’t allowed to even cross the street until I was twelve.

I entered public school in the 6th grade. I wore cheap clothes from Walmart and was still kind of chubby, so the peer ridicule continued. I made friends with the older goth kids and got into anarchism, atheism, and heavy music. My home life continued to worsen and my mother would ground me for no reason sometimes. I spent a lot of time in the attic, where my room is, in the dark with a fan on me, listening to “Adam’s Song” by Blink-182 on repeat. My father was on tons of anti-depressants, which he drank and smoked crack while on, and there were frequent bouts between my mother and him as he disappeared from time to time, spending our savings on prostitutes and drugs. I watched him lose his mind many times. My mother scared the shit out of me. Not every day was bad, but too much of it was bad.

I got good grades throughout middle school, though my outspoken behavior, interest in shocking others, and increased interest in a juvenile, vague idea of anarchism and rebellion made me an easy target for the principal. They had meetings with my mother a lot. One time, they gave her a packet on occult and Satanic symbology to look out for. I decided that year that I never wanted to smoke, drink, or do drugs and would sometimes wear X’s on my hands to signify this (though I did not know the term “straightedge” yet). I had two best friends. One got taken away by child protective (his parents were close friends of my parents) and the other, Kevin, was with me through thick and thin until the 10th grade, when we would separate because he became a drug dealer.

In the 8th grade, I started dating my first girlfriend, Hannah, who was a few years younger than me. I had met her by jokingly pulling a knife out on her in the park one evening. I was arrested for the first time in my life because of that incident and they even put the knife in a bag as “evidence”. I had a social worker I spoke to a lot. I started writing in a DeadJournal, which many people from school read, and a parent saw an entry once where I mentioned wanting to kill myself, my parents, and people at the school. I wound up being forced into the psychiatric ward for an entire week because of it, where I would be diagnosed for the first time with bipolar disorder and opposition defiant disorder. I was put on my first anti-depressant, which I believe was depakote, and soon after started seeing a therapist, who turned out to be the same guy I saw when I was nine. I had started cutting myself and stabbing myself a lot around then.

By high school, I was pretty popular and thinner, but growing anti-social. I started dating a girl named Lisa, who I met on the first day of school, and she took my virginity. By the end of the year, we had broken up and I had started dating a girl named Teri. On the last day of school that year, a riot broke out and I was chosen at random by two police officers who beat the shit out of me and arrested me, later charging me with “inciting to riot” and “obstruction of justice”. I wrote a lengthy report of their abuse and the charges were dropped, but I was still suspended out-of-school for the first six months of 10th grade, where I would go to a house and do packets for two hours a day. I was with Teri for one year and one month. She was my first love.

Around that time, I got into liberal-sided politics, anti-racism, vegetarianism, and protest. My home life gradually got worse. I babysat for money whenever I wasn’t picking through garbage and collecting bottles and cans. Teri broke up with me the summer after 10th grade and it ruined me for years and years. I stopped going home and started completely disobeying my parents. They tried to get a PINS petition against me, but because I was a good student, didn’t do drugs, and had no criminal record, they couldn’t do anything about it. My parents’ drinking and drugs problems only got worse. I would wind up in the psychiatric ward several more times, one of which was due to my mother calling the cops and telling them I was, “threatening to harm myself,” just because I defied her after dinner one day.

At the age of fifteen, I got accepted by Social Security under the terms that I was “disabled” due to mental illness. Thanks to a long paper trail of self-harm, anti-depressants, therapy, and stays at the hospital, along with my father’s history of mental illness, it wasn’t long before they accepted me. My mother would wind up stealing $2,500 from me. That was the last straw, so I started living with my grandmother. I hung out with a lot of people and had sex with a lot of girls. I couldn’t bear to see Teri in the halls of the high school, so I wound up getting home tutored for the 11th grade. I dropped out after the first quarter of my senior year and never graduated. At that point, I had no relationship with my parents and started dating a girl named Burgundy, the love of my life. At the age of seventeen, I started living on my own in subsidized housing. Burgundy moved in with me and I even got a job doing phone surveys for auto dealers.

I was in a band for three years, playing keyboard, which I had taught myself how to play. Besides writing, it was my only real passion and I wanted to do it for a living, though the others in the band wanted it as a hobbie. I withdrew myself from all of my friends and the outside world for a while. Burgundy and I dated for three years. The summer of 2008, I lost everything all at once. Burgundy got accepted into a private college and broke up with me, giving handjobs to random guys behind my back while fucking with my head for the entire summer. She had to go to some summer program and met her next boyfriend there, a Muslim math tutor with rock-solid abs. At that point, I had gained some weight (which I have yet to lose). My best friend Jay, who lived with me, moved out in the middle of the night without telling me and never spoke to me again; to this day, I have no idea why. My other close friend, Trevor, moved to California. My band broke up because I was the only one who took it seriously. I went on a camping trip with my parents after years of not talking to them and wound up in a fist fight with my mother while she drunkenly attacked everyone and tried to throw a lantern in the bonfire. I wanted to die more than I ever had in my entire life, so I pursued medication, leading to Lexapro, which significantly helped me cope with my mental illness (something I had denied until around this time) and my unfortunate life.

I got into veganism, growing a beard, DIY, and hitchhiking around that time. Anarchism held a new, special place in my heart and I vowed to myself to start actually living. And I have ever since.

Any more questions?

These three images together have recently been making rounds all over Tumblr. The post I took them from had well over 24,000 notes at the time. I won’t be reblogging it with this input because I am not confident I’ll be able to overpower the ignorance of thousands of people and also do not want to accidentally help that post gain any more unjustified momentum than it already has.

Aggressive, mindless anti-PETA rhetoric has always been popular, of course, mostly amongst ignorance omnivores who could never imagine a life without animal products, nor have the capacity to think for one second about anything that doesn’t give them some sort of selfish, instant gratification. For many who know nothing about animal rights, PETA and veganism are mutually exclusive and practically synonymous with one another. For this very reason, many vegetarians and vegans have joined the omnivores on this bandwagon, lashing out against PETA, the way they protest, the way they campaign, the way they spend money, the way they “don’t respect humans”, the way they “go too far”, and the way they “kill animals”, desperately trying their hardest to disassociate themselves from PETA and spinelessly attempting to find common ground with omnivores. Many of these turncoat animal rights advocates like to think they have serious, legitimate reasons for opposing PETA; others, more often than not, cite the website that made this flyer, doing no other research whatsoever. The thing that bothers me more than the fact that lies and propaganda that come from the meat industry are being posted all over the Internet and being blindly accepted as infallible is the fact that so many vegans and animal rights proponents are helping it to do so.

You can say whatever you want about PETA. The fact is that they should be your ally, if for no other reason than because they are the single largest, most successful and influential animal rights group in the world, whose many victories both within and outside the system of animal enterprise are recorded here. If you truly care about animal rights, then you should support PETA; you should support their tactics even when they “go too far” (there should be almost no such as thing as “too far” if it’s helping spread the word of veganism, in my opinion), you should support them even if you don’t support everything they do or say, you should support them regardless of how “you would do things” (because, let’s face it, you’re not going to start your own animal rights group and therefore won’t do anything even close to what they do). The reason people don’t like them is because they are unapologetic and confrontational. The reason their acronym is automatically associated with veganism is because they’ve done more for veganism than you or anyone else (who hasn’t done something under the A.L.F. name) ever has or will. The reason why you seem so desperate to discredit them in conversations with omnivores is because you don’t want to be written off as “a crazy PETA type” and still care so much about what people think of you and your lifestyle choices. This is pathetic and unbecoming of a true activist or revolutionary. If you’re not vegan, then of course you hate PETA; if you are vegan, then you should be ashamed of yourselves.

That rant aside, I wanted to analyze these rumors and statistics that so often are thrown around mindlessly without any second thought or serious inquiry. More often than not, these are simple slogans put against cheap, flashy imagery, seemingly not even trying to mask the obvious fact that this is propaganda, only quickly reposted by people looking specifically for things that conveniently reaffirm what they already believe without any basis.

First off, who made this poster?
It was made by a website shamelessly called PETAKillsAnimals.com, which doesn’t even try to hide its bias and purpose. This is the single most popular, and some might say the only, source of any and all anti-PETA rhetoric, used and “cited” by omnivores, vegetarians, and vegans alike. When I first heard about this site back when I was a teenager, my first instinct was to look into it and find out who was running the site itself. As I quickly found out, the site is one of many so-called “consumer freedom” propaganda campaigns put together and run by a lobbying firm called the Center for Consumer Freedom. Under the guise of essentially supporting the individual’s “right” to do terrible things to themselves and others, their only purpose is to attack advocacy and activist groups who might dissuade consumers from buying certain products. The group was initially started using over half a million dollars donated to them by Phillip Morris, the world’s biggest tobacco distributor, and to this day are financed by the fast food, meat, alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceutical industries. With over a hundred corporate sponsors and over a thousand individual sponsors, some openly named proponents and donors have included Coca-Cola, Wendy’s, Tyson Foods, Monsanto, and Pilgrim’s Pride, as well as companies who own casinos, slot machines, cigars, and steak distributors. Yes, they are literally a product of the very industries most straightedge vegans are trying to rail against and help support some of the world’s most corrupt and politically influential corporate groups.

Other websites and campaigns of theirs have gone after the Humane Society, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Greenpeace, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, and the Center for Science in the Public Interest; basically, any group that is trying to open eyes and blow the whistle on the destructive nature of the corporations who run our country and are killing all of us slowly through drugs and unhealthy, unethical food and habits. It is no secret once you know this that this group is not in defense of animals or their rights, but only in it to keep people eating meat and hating anyone who tries to tell them not to or to feel bad about it.

Now, let’s analyze this poster of theirs…

“This is what PETA does with your money.”
Actually, no. This is what they do with their money. PETA always publicizes their annual financial reports, which cover how much money they’ve made, where it came from, and how it was spent. Almost 98% of their earnings come directly from donations and contributions, the other money coming from merchandise. Their employees all make between $25,000 and $40,000 a year, the president of the group, Ingrid Newkirk, making just over $38,000.

While it is certainly true that some of this money goes towards the euthanization of animals, the bulk of their money goes towards campaigns, where literature is handed out, demonstrations are held, speakers are put on tour, and word is spread through successful advertising tactics. To reduce their spending to some sort of dog and cat genocide is ridiculous. Plus, the Photoshop job they did on this poster is atrocious.

“PETA has killed over 12,400 dogs and cats at its Norfolk, VA headquarters.”
This is true and they successfully have posted the documents proving it on their site. Now it’s a matter of how they use this information to support their cause.

First off, PETA did not “kill” 12,400 dogs and cats; they euthanized 12,400 dogs and cats. The distinction between the two is very important here and they know that. Coming from a past career in veterinary care where she regularly had to euthanize sick, neglected, unwanted, and dying animals, Ingrid Newkirk and PETA have always been open proponents for humane euthanasia and have gone in depth as to why they oppose “no-kill” shelters. Despite being posted in the context of some expose, these facts were never hidden nor denied and have been publicly stated.

The vast majority of the animals they “take in” are never taken in with intent of prolonging the animals’ lives until they find them a home; PETA is not and never has been a no-kill shelter or animal adoption agency. Their facilities in Norfolk consist of an office building and, while they do at times bring animals there, they work with other facilities in the area to hold animals. They often take animals who are about to be euthanized anyway from other shelters specifically so they can euthanize them themselves by their own standards, which they believe to be the most humane, quick, and painless. In fact, they offer free euthanasia to animals from shelters that practice gassing and shooting to put animals down. Along with the American Veterinary Medical Association and The Humane Society, they believe, “an intravenous injection of sodium pentobarbital administered by a trained professional is the kindest, most compassionate method of euthanizing animals.” The inhumane alternative methods used by other shelters are described in detail here. This explains much of the high number of “animals euthanized”. The specific state of each and every animal they take in and release, adopt out, or put down is never recorded, which invalidates any statement by PETA Kills Animals that these animals were perfectly suited for adoption. In fact, the animals they take in normally include litters of feral cat colonies suffering from feline AIDS an leukemia and puppies with parvo.

Furthermore, if you actually look at the official records acquired by PETA Kills Animals, you will see they actually have a record of spaying/neutering and returning animals far more often than they euthanize them. Somewhere between six and eight million animals wind up in shelters per year in America… PETA kills between one and four thousand of their own.

And, really, that’s all they’ve got. Every time they use the word “kill”, they are referring to euthanasia. Nothing more. For more information on the animals they take in, why, and what they decide to do with them, refer to this response to a letter about the issue by PETA.

What are those other two images?
The first image comes from a single investigation that occurred in 2005 when two PETA employees were caught dumping euthanized dog corpses into a dumpster behind a grocery store. This happened once, seven years ago and involved only two employees of PETA, but is used time and time again as some sort of indication of PETA’s carelessness towards animal life or something. The two individuals who were caught were subsequently indicted and fired by PETA. It was admitted that what they were doing was not standard procedure in any way by PETA staff and that the majority of animals euthanized are frozen until transported to a cremation service. The second image is a corny comic drawn to exaggerate this isolated incident.

In conclusion, please stop helping spread propaganda and start thinking for yourselves.
Vegans: Be more proud of your beliefs and lifestyle choices. Be proud and supportive of activist groups who are fighting the fight with you and be humbled by how much harder they’re working towards a better tomorrow than you are. If someone you are talking to about animal rights writes you off as a “crazy PETA person”, then they’re probably too far gone to convert, anyway, so don’t worry about disassociating yourself with them in hopes of getting to more people. If someone is willing to write off an entire movement based on the actions of a single group, then they likely are going to be willing to utilize all the other ridiculous excuses for continuing to eat meat.
Omnivores: You cannot justify eating animals. Making PETA look bad does nothing to make veganism or animal rights look bad. Do you know why animal enterprise needs groups like the Center for Consumer Freedom? Because they don’t have facts and ethics as ammo to justify what they do for a living. If the best you can do is link to a poorly designed propaganda site owned by the meat industry, then you might want to start reconsidering the validity of your decision to keep eating animal products.

Lastly, please never take what you see on the Internet at face value, not even this! Always independently research everything you see or hear and remember to question everything! Please reblog and help combat propaganda-driven smear campaigns.

01.) Armor For Sleep: “The Wanderers Guild”
02.) Baths: “Indoorsy”
03.) Best Coast: “Why I Cry”
04.) Commissioner: “Click Click Flash”
05.) Figurine: “IMpossible”
06.) The Gaslight Anthem: “Old Haunts”
07.) Goldfinger: “Behind the Mask”
08.) Jawbreaker: “Accident Prone”
09.) Joyce Manor: “See How Tame I Can Be”
10.) Julie Nunes: “Lullaby”
11.) Ke$ha (ft. Lil’ Wayne, Wiz Khalifa, T.I., and Andre 3000): “Get Sleazier”
12.) La Dispute: “King Park”
13.) Lynyrd Skynyrd: “Free Bird”
14.) Man Man: “Easy Eats Or Dirty Doctor Galapagos”
15.) The Microphones: “I Want Wind to Blow”
16.) Mike XVX: “We Must Look Like Monsters”
17.) Mixtapes: “Even On the Worst Nights”
18.) Mount Eerie: “Lone Bell”
19.) Nicki Minaj: “Starships”
20.) Nine Inch Nails: “Love Is Not Enough”
21.) Oh No! Yoko: “Go Alien”
22.) Passion Pit: “Live to Tell the Tale”
23.) Pedals On Our Pirate Ships: “No Bad Blood”
24.) Poison the Well: “Apathy Is a Cold Body”
25.) The Prodigy: “Omen”
26.) Propagandhi: “Without Love”
27.) Propagandhi: “the Funeral Procession”
28.) Refused: “The Deadly Rhythm (of the Production Line)”
29.) Run, Forever: “Letters”
30.) RVIVR: “Paper Thin”
31.) Rye ‘n Clover: “Remember the Sunflowers”
32.) The Shoes: “People Movin’”
33.) Slipknot: “Disasterpiece”
34.) Star Fucking Hipsters: “Two Cups of Tea”
35.) Tim Kasher: “The Jessica”
36.) Wiz Khalifa: “Roll Up”

Wise up, America.

Just reached 3,000 followers. That means I’m a pretty big deal and that I’m awesome, obviously.

- Do the things you do while drinking, minus the drinking

Why did my Tumblr get almost 57,000 views today?