What has happened to my wonderful and formerly free country? This legislation is designed to eliminate free speech, peaceful assembly, and even threatens freedom of the press. Why? For opposing cruelty to animals? You know, maybe in China - but not in MY country, not the good ol U. S. of A.
Because I speak for the voiceless trapped behind locked and bloody laboratory doors I am a terrorist? Because I urge people to boycott KFC unitl they eliminate the worst abuses to billions of helpless chickens - just babies really, only 6 to 8 weeks old when they are strung up by their feet, have their throats slit, and then go into the scalding tank, many of them still alive, because I try to stop this I am a terrorist? I'm a terrorist for trying to stop these and other people from profitting from animal cruelty?
How did this happen?
My father made the U. S. Army his career and he fought for our freedoms. He may not have agreed with me on animal rights but he believed that I had a right to speak my mind and a duty to follow my conscience. All those years he was away from his family, the scarifices he made, and the toll that being an infantry man in World War II and in Korea took on him - has all been made a mockery of now - by our own government.
My father died of cancer - more than 30 years after former President Richard Nixon declared a "War on Cancer" by effectively writing blank checks to vivisectors to find a cure. We have no cure - animal research does not work. It's not about finding cures, it's about getting millions of dollars in government grants, about getting papers published, about getting tenure and gratifying egos. Meanwhile people who are ill and desperate to believe for a cure are willing to accept the suffering of millions of helpless animals as a necessary evil. If only they knew the truth, if only they could sit aside their fears long enough to stop listening to the pro-vivisection lobby, the lying men and women in white lab coats.
Those of us who have looked beyond the pro-industry propaganda and who refuse to accept evil as necessary can not now be scared into silence. We can not allow ourselves to be intimated with threats of imprisonment and loss of our freedom and our most basic of rights. Our eyes have already seen the truth and we can not put blinders on - we must continue to be a voice for the voiceless.
This is a very scary time to be an animal rights activist in the U.S.A. but every day is scary for the animals locked in laboratories, held on factory farms until being shipped to slaughter, trapped in steel-jaw leghold traps, caged on fur farms, chained in circuses, and bred to the point of death in puppy mills. We must stand for them, and in doing so stand for our rights also.
What happened to my country? I want it back!