Time for a morality check

Morals are a tricky thing. Mostly because the definition of morality is up to each individual person. We don't claim to have better morals than others. Our morals just work for us. Most of us have a similar core grop of morals. Gimmies like buying your 2 year old a lap dance for their birthday or hitting a woman. Both of those are things we hope are universally accepted as immoral.

One of the things that really grinds our gears is when somebody tries to tell us we're immoral. Because most of the time they don't know a thing about us and usually the moral sticking point is something that is anything but a no brainer. Which brings us to Fitzy's column yesterday.

He reviews the book "Edges of Bounty: Adventures in the Edible Valley" by William Emery. The book is about...well we're not entirely sure. (Which is a great sign of quality writing) Whatever it is, it invokes a lot of "isms", which is never a good sign. The main ism that's thrown around appears to be edibilism, which apparently is the practice of catching or growing one's own food. Emery argues that this method is morally superior to commerically grown/purchased food. Why? We never find out. It just is. (Which is a shakey arguement for a blog, let alone a newspaper column.)

Wait a sec, arguements about commercialism and morality without anything substantial to back it up? Why, I believe that's the mating call of the...oh fuck. Hippies! (And if he's not a hippie, he probably should have left out the part about lazily smoking from a pipe on the porch)

God we hate hippies. Out of all the people who try to force their own set of morals upon other people, hippies are the fucking worst (Mormons are second worst).

We're not even going to dignify most of his claims with a respose because that would be lowering ourselves to his level. We don't claim the moral high ground. Because as we said before, everybody's different. Respecting livestock and growing your own food may be good for you, unfortunatly we have these things called lives.

We will tackle his main claim though. Emery states that food you grow/catch/kill yourself is better because you can just tatse to moral superiority oozing out of its juices. So we asked our resident farm boy (El Duke) if that's true. His response:

"I've personally chopped the heads off of and defeathered chickens in my backyard for dinner and didn't notice any difference from store bought chicken. Same goes for the pigs we raised, but how can one really improve upon bacon? He might have a point with food you grow, but that's more because of the sense of accomplishment than anything moral. And a sense of accomplishment doesn't taste like dick."

Wow, that response stank of moral inferiority didn't it? We're not trying to say what Emery wrote is inherently wrong, it's the casual use of the concept of morals that we take issue with. Emery doesn't know any better than you or I do because every person is an individual. What one person might call "parasitical urbanism" might be called "supply and demand" by another. Who's wrong? That's not really for us to decide. (Hint: It's the dirty hippie.)

Don't think we forgot about you Fitzy. What the fuck's up with all the hippie ads lately? First that faith healer bullshit and now this? At least you wrote the Reiki column. Half this column is regurgitated shit from some jackass's book. We can shit out two posts a day in addition to the actual jobs we have, and you can't even form a fucking opinion on the book who's passages you lifted to fill space? You just thank the guy for coming by and realizing we had to step up production after we started supplying goods for more cities.

While we appreciate a good "present the facts and let the reader decide" story as much as the next guy, it usually helps if you present the other side. Otherwise you're pretty much just handing your column over to some douchebag who came by and said our agricultural system is fucked up because they ("they" meaning the ag industry) want to make money. God forbid families get supported.