When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

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Just last night I dined. I dined on a fine fatted steak, juicy and tender. In life it had been fed upon grass, and finished off as the waitress did inform me, upon grain. One must eat to survive, and so to survive one must kill - either animal, vegetable, or both. This is true of all species of animal. This is true because one does not eat dirt and live, and so:

to survive one must eat, to eat one must kill, and therefore: to survive one must kill.

To dine is to eat with elegance, and to eat with elegance requires one to kill, with elegance. Only one species takes such great pleasure in its survival that it has learned to fatten the calf and then kill it purely for the pleasure of eating.

There is, I say, a fatted calf in our midst that is ripe for the killing. It is, as I will show, a clear matter of survival - but let us be neither dissolute nor morose upon the occasion, for surely we may pursue all of the elegance our hearts' may desire as we proceed to the slaughter.

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There is a Natural Law, and natural laws are like gravity - they exist in nature and are inescapable.

As I live some other must die.

This is one method of expressing a law of nature. It is an incontrovertible fact. I do survive, like each one of us, and we see that survival itself has certain dictates. It is precisely because of these dictates that as a society we arrive at the conclusion that to kill as a matter of self defense is just.

We arrive at such conclusions because they are inescapable. We codify them as a matter of Law within a system of Justice so that we may create a society which will enhance both our own survival as well as that of the species of which we are a part.

As a society we have learned to cultivate both animal and vegetable. We do so not so that the individual may be freed from the burden of killing but rather because of the measure of certainty such cultivation does provide with regard to the gathering of food - freedom from the necessity of killing is simply an added benefit. The killing does still take place, to be sure, but today the mass of humanity is no longer burdened with the sounds of the final squeal and subsequent thud as a life is ended that we may feed.

We do survive; since we survive we feed; we feed because we must; because if we do not we will not survive.

We have learned to cultivate and so we have enhanced our ability, as a species, to survive. This process of cultivation has become so efficient that it has enabled us to cultivate not only other animals with a high degree of specificity, to slaughter with elegance, and so dine in sheer pleasure. It has in fact enabled us to cultivate much more than that.

It has enabled us to cultivate ourselves, or to cultivate each other, and to do so in some very surprising, very disturbing, new ways.

In the minds of future leaders of America we are, with our academic funding policy, cultivating the premise that the mass of humanity is ripe for exploitation for something as mundane as personal gain.

The fact that we no longer kill our own food for survival, that we permit others to do so for us, and do so as a matter of social organization for the purpose of greater efficiency thus enhancing the survivability of the species, has the benefit of permitting the mass of humanity the creation of certain illusions. One being the definition of just what it is to be human.

To be human is to be humane, just as to be inhuman is to be something else: to operate without compassion, without dignity, without remorse. We are permitted such illusions because of the efficiencies our social organization has produced. Without these efficiencies, such considerations as the meaning of human or humane become meaningless. Survival becomes all.

Such considerations become meaningless, for example, among the millions of households currently surviving on food stamps. The recent cuts to this benefit of our social organization have the result of placing survivability into greater question than it was prior to those cuts. They do not have the opportunity to go out and gather food resources by direct means, as every other species does. They are instead forced to gather some form of credit which may then be exchanged - usually for labor performed. But there are no jobs, or there are far too few jobs, far too few opportunities, to gather these forms of credit which may then be exchanged for survival.

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Those who cultivate the perception that such cuts are necessary or just do not cultivate for the benefit of society, but rather for their own sheer pleasure. It is their pleasure to cultivate. It is us they are cultivating.

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It is human to cultivate. Where it is no longer simply a matter of increasing our efficiency, but rather survival itself, that is in question, we see that we need not concern ourselves with terms but rather focus on nature - to survive is an end in and of itself, and to cultivate toward that end is natural and therefore it is just no matter how inhuman.

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It will not, I think, be necessary to cultivate among those children who are so unfortunate as to always be chosen last. Such cultivation seems quite unnecessary.

Instead we must find the means of cultivating those who would cultivate us. Such individuals often insulate themselves from the rest of society. Therefore to cultivate among them requires an indirect approach. We must cultivate those around them.

For example: befriending the children of the cultivators in such a way that they are induced to intoxication, and left in an inebriated state upon the railroad tracks, will almost certainly induce some sort of reprisal upon the heads of those engaged in the befriending. It is, almost, a natural and universal law.

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Thus begins the process of Cultivation

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And just what is there to be harvested? An act of retribution? Or is this simply more cultivation?