We Have to Start Talking
This past week, my Twitter feed blew up with three major topics: the Grand Champion Steer at the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo, Joaquin Phoenix’s Oscars acceptance speech, and last but certainly not least, the “standing broom trick.” You may be asking yourself: how on God’s Green Earth do these three things relate to one another? Well buckle up boys, because you’re about to find out.
Let’s get the negative out of the way and talk about the actor Joaquin Phoenix. I know I’ve already discussed my opinion of Mr. Phoenix right after the new year, and this week’s comments are no different.
At the 2020 Oscars, Phoenix received the Oscar for Lead Actor for his role in the movie “Joker.” In his acceptance, Phoenix decided to use his stage to, you guessed it, speak out about the agriculture industry.
He gave thanks for the opportunity to work in film and said, “I think the greatest gift that it’s given me, and many of us in this room, is the opportunity to use our voice for the voiceless. I’ve been thinking a lot about some of the distressing issues that we are facing collectively and I think in times we feel, or were made to feel, that we champion different causes. But for me, I see commonality. I think whether we’re talking about gender equality, or racism, or queer rights, or indigenous rights, or animal rights — we’re talking about the fight against injustice. We’re talking about the fight against the belief that one nation, one people, one race, one gender or one species has the right to dominate control and use and exploit another with impunity.
“I think that we’ve become very disconnected with the natural world and many of us, what we’re guilty of is an egocentric world view — the belief that we’re the center of the universe. We go into the natural world and we plunder it for its resources. We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow and when she gives birth, we steal her baby even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable. And then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and cereal. I think we fear the idea of personal change because we think that we have to sacrifice something to give something up. But if human beings, at our best, are so inventive and creative and ingenuous, I think that when we use love and passion as our guiding principles, we can create, develop, and implement systems of change that are beneficial to all sentient beings and the environment.”
Can you imagine being so out of touch that you actually compare animal rights to racism?
Hard pill to swallow: Humans are, in fact, superior to animals. Until you can show me a pig who can launch a rocket into space or a cow who can conduct a successful open-heart surgery to save someone’s life, this opinion of mine will not change.
Now, on to one of the most uplifting moments on my Twitter feed this week: 12 year old Ryder Day selling his Grand Champion steer named Cupid Shuffle at the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo for $300,000.
I’ve seen the video of Day and Cupid Shuffle in the ring with what I assume is Day’s younger brother walking around and holding the steer’s winning banner. As the auctioneer announced the winning bid at $300,000, the crowd roared and Day’s younger brother took his hat off and waved it. Day grinned and patted his steer. It was precious, it made me smile. But I’ll tell you what video is even better is an interview with Day after he and Cupid Shuffle won Grand Champion the day prior to the sale.
“Nothing can go through my mind, it’s too much to think about really,” Day told Eric Alvarez, a news reporter for WFAA in Dallas. Alvarez asked Day what he planned to do with his show winnings and the answer was enough to make the Devil himself shed a tear.
Through teary yet joy-filled eyes and a little shake in his voice, Day answered, “We’re going to spend it on going to college. After we go to college, me and my brother, we will help build our ranch up just like my parents and grandparents and their parents before them.”
…I think I have something in my eye because it won’t stop watering.
The final Twitter trend I need to talk about this week is the standing broom trick. I remember, many years ago, this same little wave of information hit the internet. People claimed the Earth’s tilt was precisely at the right spot to make a broom stand on its own and would only be like this for one day.
I remember standing a broom up at school and also at home. We all thought it was cool. But then the next day, our brooms didn’t fall — in fact, I bet you a $300,000 steer that if executed correctly, you could make a broom stand on its own any day of the year.
How do all three of these things relate?
Although the broom trick was trending on Twitter, so was this headline, “You can stand your broom up but it has nothing to do with NASA or today’s specific gravitational pull.”
Well, two friends from college said it best with the following tweets.
“Wish people would listen to agriculturists as much as they listened to scientists about that d*mn broom thing.”
“The reason people are believing the brooms balance due to the tilt of the earth is the same reason people think that GMOs are bad for you. NOBODY DOES THEIR RESEARCH.”
So here we have Joaquin Phoenix, who is so self-righteous and egotistical that he has the audacity to historically blame agriculture for climate change and criticize our practices, yet jets off all across the globe to “protest,” animal agriculture for climate change.
On the other side, we have a feel good story. We have the story of Ryder Day, putting his heart and soul into raising a prime show animal and being rewarded for his hard work with a prize large enough to send both he and his brother to college, as well as put money back into his family’s livelihood: ranching.
Most people don’t see a prize going toward the future of agriculture. They don’t see his younger brother raise his hat to the crowd as a thank you. They don’t see Day’s happy and hopeful eyes. They see Joaquin Phoenix…proudly shaming the agricultural industry.
Just over 29.6 million people watched the Oscars, whereas the video of Day talking about his plans for his winnings received 1,113 retweets and 5,112 likes. Day isn’t number 2 on YouTube’s trending page, but Phoenix’s acceptance speech is.
The point I’m trying to make here is that we’ve got the goods, we just have to get it out there. At the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association meeting last week, a phrase I kept hearing was “We want to tell our story — and we’ve got a good one to tell.”
I whole-heartedly, without a doubt believe that agriculture is in the right. Every now and then, some crazy videos will come out with damning acts being shown, but that’s not usually the case. The bad part is though, those videos are what is seen by 29.6 million people.
Imagine if one of the trending headlines on Twitter wasn’t a correction about a stupid broom trick, but a correction of the misconception that agriculture is destroying the planet.
