Opinion
 

Morality should remain personal

By Joshua Curry

A man went into a coffee shop wearing an Arnold Schwarzenegger T-shirt. Starts out like a joke, right? Well, I work at the coffee shop and felt inclined to ask him to translate the Terminator's German jumble printed on the shirt. He informed me that it was a Nazi battle cry of some sort, at which point I began to itch my collar and search for the nearest exit. "This is for Arnold, or ..." I tried to ask.

"Against him," the man barked at me. "Anybody who supports abortion is a Nazi." This conversation went nuts somewhere about eight seconds ago, I thought to myself. I flew off the bull with a bewildered laugh -- the type which cues that little computerized voice in the back of my head to repeat "the customer is always right" and immediately quell my cackle down to that jovial laughter you can hear at coffee shops the nation over.

This topic isn't the kind you can rationally think out. It resembles those tedious religious debates when, regardless of the argument, seldom is anything proven. Opinions usually nail the argument to the floor and a monstrous cloud of bad energy exudes from both sides. I long ago learned to parry those discussions with my only certainty -- all the people painting Adam and Eve with navels should take a second look, if not a first. 

At the ripe age of 14, a friend of mine was faced with the decision to likely ruin two lives or to start fresh with her own. She felt she had made the right decision. I'm not sure about all of you but I would choose a life with my significant other over one with my unborn child if those were my options. I don't presume to say either of these are easy decisions. Nor do I argue the rights or wrongs of the two. This isn't an issue of right or wrong.

Yet, here we choice-fiends are being related to that ugly little meth-head Hitler and his cronies, who have stood the test of time and remained reviled long after America's intense hatreds for communism and a smatter of nationalities have faded. You want to talk absolute truth? If you ask me, the true wrongs in this world are people like Hitler who murder or pilfer for some sick desire to wield power over other's lives. Otherwise I try to keep my personal opinions of right and wrong limited to myself and my own doings. I would expect the same from everyone else, but I'm a cynic, not a saint, and I welcome feedback.

This man, however, inspired me to the exception -- it's time to take a stand against the horror of fowl ghettos where dangerous chemicals are showered on stacks of immobile chickens. The same chickens that sit with severed beaks under a regimen of hormones and drugs to help them fulfill their only purpose -- to get fat or to lay, and all for the eating public (that's most of you, even if you throw it up right after). So what is there to do? The next time the abortion truck comes by campus and the little boy and his geriatric counterparts preach the good fight, we can stand side by side with our own gigantic posters of dead chickens and guts, all smashed under more dead chickens and guts. We also deserve to make you lose your appetite and simultaneously prove we're not Nazis.

Please direct all "Hitler was a vegetarian" e-mails to me. 

Curry, a columnist for The Daily Cougar, 
can be reached at barelyafloat@hotmail.com.