Editorial: Why The Coronavirus Is The Best Thing To Ever Happen To Us And Why We Shouldn't Be 'Getting Back To Normal'
This is an editorial, not based on anything but my opinion. Shall not be seen as news. Please refere to to the CDC Website for accurate information.
Okay, so I think thank this whole virus thing should be and is a wakeup call for us as a society. We for decades and well over a century have been abusing, manipulating, and destroying our planet. And now that we all have been forced to stay inside, not travel, and so on, we have seen a massive change in the way that the planet behaves, and a massive change in the other animals we share this spinning rock with. Yesterday it was brought to my attention while I was looking through all of this because I was curious what was going on outside my bubble and I came across something interesting. I found a few pictures and videos that surprised me not more people are talking about.
The First thing that I saw was a video from somewhere in Asia where an entire convoy of Elephants were crossing the road and it was stated that this had not happened in decades due to the high volume of cars that drive on that road daily. Someone filmed it and said they had never seen the animals act like this or even come near where humans normally travel through because of the comotion of cars moving and so on. I think this is really interesting.
The second thing that I saw was a picture from somewhere in Africa of a family of lions that were sprawled out on a asphalt paved road enjoying their time warming up in the sun. This also has never happened in recent history. These lions never come to these places because of the traffic and commotion that happens on a daily basis while us humans travel around.
The third thing I saw was a comparison between the week before the shutdown, a few days into the shutdown and then today of many cities skylines including Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Hong Kong, and other large cities around the globe. The difference between then and now is that there is no pollution and for the first time in my life I have been able to see further on the horizon than I have ever in my life. I always asked why the skys weren't clear when I was a little girl and I never understood why they HAD to be smoggy or unclean.
The fourth thing that I was reported from Venice about how wild boars are starting to reclaim the city and other wild animals making their way back into city streets where they naturally would be able to move around freely and live but because of human activity and building. I have seen videos of dolphins and other ocean life returning to our shores here in Los Angeles and other places around the world. Edit: **Dolphins are native to the shores of Italy and have been a common occurrence for a long time but what is new is that for the first time in i don't even know how long the Venice canals are clear and you can see the bottom. This is an amazing feet, and I will not it is only clear in some spaces but it is more clear than it normally is** This shows me that they only stay away because of their fear or dissatisfaction with the way humans conduct themselves.
The reason why I am writing this is to point out the difference just a few weeks, and let me remind you it has now only been about a month and a couple of days that this has been mostly shut down. We have seen record number of changes in the animal behavior since we went inside. We have seen the planet, in my opinion heal from the harm that us as a species have caused. I believe this is how it should stay from here on out.
What gives us the right to the entirety of the land on this earth? Just because we have the ability to create words out of our mouths or build things with our hands? Just because we can doesn't really mean that we should. I hope this is not the point that most of you click off this article and write me off so hear me out. We never need to go back to normal. Ever. This i think, is the biggest wake up call we as a race have ever experienced in modern history. We live in a time where we are having record warming globally, we are having record rates of pollution numbers, cases of cancer, crime, and poverty. For the first time in a lifetime we are having a slow down. This is the first time in our modern history where we don't have to go outside and work or go to a job or have the ability to do anything and citing my examples above the planet itself is recovering from us and our influence. Normally according to migration paths those elephants would walk across the space that road was built through, the lions would be able to relax and sleep on the spaces the road now occupies, the marine life that has returned to our shores have come back to their natural habitat, and for the first time in my lifetime I have been able to breathe the cleanest air I have ever breathed in the city I live in and I now can see across the whole city without being obstructed with massive amounts of smog.
This is a unprecedented time and all I am hearing is people complain that they want to resume with the rat race of life. Why are people so willing or eager to get back to the office and work behind a computer screen for 40 hours a week or be yelled at at work for not getting someone their 'Big Mac' on time or fast enough. Why do you want to resume not seeing your family or spending time with your kids. I am not saying that we should all quit life and society and never go back to work. What I am saying is we need to think about the effects that we have on our planet and work as a whole. If these animals have now reclaimed spaces we humans took away from them years ago why do we have the right to take it again when this all dies down and is over?
The short answer is we don't and we shouldn't, or at least in the same way that we did before.
The next point I would like to make is none of this wouldn't have happened if our entire culture as a species would be vegan. I know this is going to lose a lot of readers and I am sorry if you don't want to hear me out but it is true. Covid-19 was transmitted from an animal some human ate in China. If we didn't factory farm or illegally farm, in the case of Covid-19 animals for our own food none of us would have gotten sick. Reminder the Swine Flu, Bird Flu, and other massive outbreaks all came from a animal that was eaten when it had this virus being carried in their bodies. As of the writing of this article on April 18, 2020 a quick google search estimates that the total number of cases of Covid-19 is 2,287,083 and over 155,000 deaths to date. If we as a society didn't harm other living creatures we wouldn't have had this pandemic happen. I am not about to say that the amount of deaths is a good thing because any lost of life is not good and is terrible, what I am going to say is that we should be thankful we have a time of rest. And we should highly consider changing our ways and the ways that our society functions because of this virus to prevent this from ever happening again.
I am calling for a shift in the foods that we eat and the way we farm food in general from here on out. I am also calling for the immediate transition period to weed out the consumption of non plant-based foods in their entirety. not only to benefit humans but to benefit the animals that we have abused and slaughtered to feed our own mouths for thousands of years.
We can, should and must make this change going forward.
What do animals eat? Plants. What do we need to survive? Plants.
According to the WHO(World Health Organization) a vegan fully plant based diet is not only possible to live and get the necessary nutrition humans need but is recommended the healthiest eating lifestyle choice we can make for our bodies. The best part of this is also we at the same time then are given the benefit of being able to transition our fields that we use for Cattle and other farming into crop fields. 71 percent of our land is considered habitable, and half of that land is used for agriculture. Of that 50 percent, 77 percent is used for livestock, either as land for grazing or land to grow animal feed. This in my observation is a really wasteful way to use the land we are given. If we chose as a society to move to a plant based eating style we would not only be able to end world hunger by the means of reducing the cost of food globally we would also stop global warming and be able to reverse the damage we have done in the last couple hundred years.
You may ask how would we end world hunger? Well, plants are much easier to produce, much cheaper to make, and much easier to transport than livestock around the world. That paired with compassion and the more wealthy countries pitching in to help those at the very bottom would be able in a matter of decades fix the problems of world hunger and we could solve something that people have been basically joking about for as long as I can remember.
We would be able to reverse climate change. How? Well with less pollution and us passing global Co2 emission taxes or banning it all together we would be able to reverse some of the damage we have caused in our lifetimes.
I can talk on and on about the benefits to changing the way we work and how we can change but it is time to have this conversation now before we try to resume daily life. Are we going to ignore these obvious signs that something is up and we need to change the way our society works. I will say this once and only once. If we are not going to learn from this global experience and change from our experiences we do not deserve to live on after this. Life is about experiences and growing as individuals and as a species. If we ignore the lessons we learn we are doomed.
We need to push politicians and world leaders to drastically shift away from our old ways and make systemic changes to the way our world functions and we as the working class, should be now able to fight back and rise up against the owner class and the companies that control the way the world works in order to change the way our society works and most importantly save the planet, the animals, and make the only planet that we have sustainable for all living creatures on it from here on out and forever. Please think about this as you sit at home and reflect on this time as a lesson that we aren't alone in this and we can take this hardship and learn and grow from it. We are better than this and we should be better than this.
This article is an Editorial and should be treated as such. It is an opinion piece that I felt needed to be written. The views in this piece do not reflect the views of Culture Slate or its networks.
Okay, so I think thank this whole virus thing should be and is a wakeup call for us as a society. We for decades and well over a century have been abusing, manipulating, and destroying our planet. And now that we all have been forced to stay inside, not travel, and so on, we have seen a massive change in the way that the planet behaves, and a massive change in the other animals we share this spinning rock with. Yesterday it was brought to my attention while I was looking through all of this because I was curious what was going on outside my bubble and I came across something interesting. I found a few pictures and videos that surprised me not more people are talking about.
The First thing that I saw was a video from somewhere in Asia where an entire convoy of Elephants were crossing the road and it was stated that this had not happened in decades due to the high volume of cars that drive on that road daily. Someone filmed it and said they had never seen the animals act like this or even come near where humans normally travel through because of the comotion of cars moving and so on. I think this is really interesting.
The second thing that I saw was a picture from somewhere in Africa of a family of lions that were sprawled out on a asphalt paved road enjoying their time warming up in the sun. This also has never happened in recent history. These lions never come to these places because of the traffic and commotion that happens on a daily basis while us humans travel around.
The third thing I saw was a comparison between the week before the shutdown, a few days into the shutdown and then today of many cities skylines including Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Hong Kong, and other large cities around the globe. The difference between then and now is that there is no pollution and for the first time in my life I have been able to see further on the horizon than I have ever in my life. I always asked why the skys weren't clear when I was a little girl and I never understood why they HAD to be smoggy or unclean.
The fourth thing that I was reported from Venice about how wild boars are starting to reclaim the city and other wild animals making their way back into city streets where they naturally would be able to move around freely and live but because of human activity and building. I have seen videos of dolphins and other ocean life returning to our shores here in Los Angeles and other places around the world. Edit: **Dolphins are native to the shores of Italy and have been a common occurrence for a long time but what is new is that for the first time in i don't even know how long the Venice canals are clear and you can see the bottom. This is an amazing feet, and I will not it is only clear in some spaces but it is more clear than it normally is** This shows me that they only stay away because of their fear or dissatisfaction with the way humans conduct themselves.
The reason why I am writing this is to point out the difference just a few weeks, and let me remind you it has now only been about a month and a couple of days that this has been mostly shut down. We have seen record number of changes in the animal behavior since we went inside. We have seen the planet, in my opinion heal from the harm that us as a species have caused. I believe this is how it should stay from here on out.
What gives us the right to the entirety of the land on this earth? Just because we have the ability to create words out of our mouths or build things with our hands? Just because we can doesn't really mean that we should. I hope this is not the point that most of you click off this article and write me off so hear me out. We never need to go back to normal. Ever. This i think, is the biggest wake up call we as a race have ever experienced in modern history. We live in a time where we are having record warming globally, we are having record rates of pollution numbers, cases of cancer, crime, and poverty. For the first time in a lifetime we are having a slow down. This is the first time in our modern history where we don't have to go outside and work or go to a job or have the ability to do anything and citing my examples above the planet itself is recovering from us and our influence. Normally according to migration paths those elephants would walk across the space that road was built through, the lions would be able to relax and sleep on the spaces the road now occupies, the marine life that has returned to our shores have come back to their natural habitat, and for the first time in my lifetime I have been able to breathe the cleanest air I have ever breathed in the city I live in and I now can see across the whole city without being obstructed with massive amounts of smog.
This is a unprecedented time and all I am hearing is people complain that they want to resume with the rat race of life. Why are people so willing or eager to get back to the office and work behind a computer screen for 40 hours a week or be yelled at at work for not getting someone their 'Big Mac' on time or fast enough. Why do you want to resume not seeing your family or spending time with your kids. I am not saying that we should all quit life and society and never go back to work. What I am saying is we need to think about the effects that we have on our planet and work as a whole. If these animals have now reclaimed spaces we humans took away from them years ago why do we have the right to take it again when this all dies down and is over?
The short answer is we don't and we shouldn't, or at least in the same way that we did before.
The next point I would like to make is none of this wouldn't have happened if our entire culture as a species would be vegan. I know this is going to lose a lot of readers and I am sorry if you don't want to hear me out but it is true. Covid-19 was transmitted from an animal some human ate in China. If we didn't factory farm or illegally farm, in the case of Covid-19 animals for our own food none of us would have gotten sick. Reminder the Swine Flu, Bird Flu, and other massive outbreaks all came from a animal that was eaten when it had this virus being carried in their bodies. As of the writing of this article on April 18, 2020 a quick google search estimates that the total number of cases of Covid-19 is 2,287,083 and over 155,000 deaths to date. If we as a society didn't harm other living creatures we wouldn't have had this pandemic happen. I am not about to say that the amount of deaths is a good thing because any lost of life is not good and is terrible, what I am going to say is that we should be thankful we have a time of rest. And we should highly consider changing our ways and the ways that our society functions because of this virus to prevent this from ever happening again.
I am calling for a shift in the foods that we eat and the way we farm food in general from here on out. I am also calling for the immediate transition period to weed out the consumption of non plant-based foods in their entirety. not only to benefit humans but to benefit the animals that we have abused and slaughtered to feed our own mouths for thousands of years.
We can, should and must make this change going forward.
What do animals eat? Plants. What do we need to survive? Plants.
According to the WHO(World Health Organization) a vegan fully plant based diet is not only possible to live and get the necessary nutrition humans need but is recommended the healthiest eating lifestyle choice we can make for our bodies. The best part of this is also we at the same time then are given the benefit of being able to transition our fields that we use for Cattle and other farming into crop fields. 71 percent of our land is considered habitable, and half of that land is used for agriculture. Of that 50 percent, 77 percent is used for livestock, either as land for grazing or land to grow animal feed. This in my observation is a really wasteful way to use the land we are given. If we chose as a society to move to a plant based eating style we would not only be able to end world hunger by the means of reducing the cost of food globally we would also stop global warming and be able to reverse the damage we have done in the last couple hundred years.
You may ask how would we end world hunger? Well, plants are much easier to produce, much cheaper to make, and much easier to transport than livestock around the world. That paired with compassion and the more wealthy countries pitching in to help those at the very bottom would be able in a matter of decades fix the problems of world hunger and we could solve something that people have been basically joking about for as long as I can remember.
We would be able to reverse climate change. How? Well with less pollution and us passing global Co2 emission taxes or banning it all together we would be able to reverse some of the damage we have caused in our lifetimes.
I can talk on and on about the benefits to changing the way we work and how we can change but it is time to have this conversation now before we try to resume daily life. Are we going to ignore these obvious signs that something is up and we need to change the way our society works. I will say this once and only once. If we are not going to learn from this global experience and change from our experiences we do not deserve to live on after this. Life is about experiences and growing as individuals and as a species. If we ignore the lessons we learn we are doomed.
We need to push politicians and world leaders to drastically shift away from our old ways and make systemic changes to the way our world functions and we as the working class, should be now able to fight back and rise up against the owner class and the companies that control the way the world works in order to change the way our society works and most importantly save the planet, the animals, and make the only planet that we have sustainable for all living creatures on it from here on out and forever. Please think about this as you sit at home and reflect on this time as a lesson that we aren't alone in this and we can take this hardship and learn and grow from it. We are better than this and we should be better than this.
This article is an Editorial and should be treated as such. It is an opinion piece that I felt needed to be written. The views in this piece do not reflect the views of Culture Slate or its networks.
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