Reach exceeding grasp…

A brilliant and dear friend of mine once put my vegetarianism down as “a luxury of being a well-to-do American.” I saw her point. Though vegetarians do not need to be rich, it demands a greater energy and consideration of consumption than is practical. The cheapest typical diet in America is built around omnivores; it is not healthful nor is it designed for sustainability. And to thumb one’s nose at the people who are too tied to the system to think about it is mean-spirited. And yet.

The freedom of choice (in every sense, down to the famous reproductive one) has long been the purview of the wealthy and slowly devolves into the hands of the poorer and poorer people. It is certainly unfair. It is one of the many ways that our hierarchical system is unfortunate. Locking people into positions of economic and material need is terrible. Locking them into personal and ethical choices that they might deem unsound seems perhaps worse to me.

It seems to me that the well-off have several ways to interpret their abundant resources. One school of thought argues that they should enjoy wealth to its maximum – we are not meant to be martyrs, et cetera. Another school would say that we have some sort of obligation to consider the world that we have some say in determining. In America at least, with wealth and education comes a greater access to controlling the destiny of society.

And that’s sort of why I am doing this. I don’t judge people who aren’t fasting. I don’t want to guilt anyone into choices that are not theirs. But, as we tinker with what makes our lives work we might get better insights in how we help shape the world around us. Given that my life will soon tilt heavily towards public interest, I think it’s good to make these sorts of calls. And ideally, those of us who are possessed of wealth and education and time can help ensure that others aren’t bound to be tied to a system that is fraught with peril. So, I want to run this experiment now and more as I go on with the dim hope that I might be able to see ways that the system can allow better choices to others. But running headlong into bad decisions because that’s what our socioeconomic system is geared towards seems like a lousy proposition.