The chicken truck

  I was behind the chicken truck the other day on the freeway.  It's a pretty pathetic sight--a tractor-trailer stacked with wire cages, chickens huddled in each one, on the way to the processing plant.  I always feel badly for the chickens... it reminds me of Charge of the Light Brigade.  "Theirs is not to reason why, theirs is but to do and die, into the valley of death rode the 600."  Perhaps I think too much about the chicken truck.

  But I can't help but wonder if I'd be a vegetarian if I had to kill my own chicken to make dinner.  It'd be hard for me to look a chicken in the eye and kill it.  I'm the guy who feels terrible when he runs over a squirrel on the road.  I hit a bird the other day and spent ten minutes convincing myself it was the bird's fault for flying in front of my car.  I have a hard time believing that I could kill a cow just because I was hungry.  I think I'd end up eating rice and beans instead.

  I don't think there's anything wrong with eating meat, or with hunting or killing animals for food, but I wonder how many more of us would be vegetarians if we had to kill our meat personally.  I don't have a problem picking up a packet of chicken breasts at the grocery store, but I'm not just wired to kill and eat.

  The distance from our food source makes it easy to forget that the chicken breast was once a living, breathing chicken.

  In the same way, our distance, emotional and physical, from our brothers and sisters in the world makes it easier to forget about their needs, about their situations.

  As a society, we're very separated from each other, now more than ever.  Technology can bring us together, but it can also keep us apart as we seek an individualized experience.  Football stadiums are now trying to enhance the 'in-stadium' experience because it's often more comfortable to stay home and watch the game on television than to spend three hours with unpredictable strangers.  We are becoming increasingly isolated from our neighbors and co-workers.  The 24 hours news network now brings us constant stories of struggle and strife from around the world, and we become immune to it over time.  Each day seems to bring some new explosion from Afghanistan or Iraq or somewhere else in the world, and it's easy to forget that those are individual lives being torn apart.

  In a world where our interactions can be tightly controlled over Facebook, where we can manage our personal interactions to our own level of comfort, it's easy to forget the humanity of one another.  But we're called to remember that each and every person on this planet is made in the image of God, and that each and every one is precious to him and, because they're precious to him, they should be precious to us.  We each have a life and a story, loves and joys, and they matter.  May we struggle against a world that depersonalizes, that distances us from one another, and may we be willing to enter into the messy-ness of humanity and proclaim a God who took on human flesh so that we might be saved!