Here at Vegan Reader, I have spoken extensively about how aerial spraying without consent violates our constitutional rights to life and liberty. Enforcing pesticide-induced illness is so obvious a threat to life and liberty, you’d think we wouldn’t need to be talking ourselves hoarse trying to get CDFA, OEHHA, USDA and Governor Schwarzenegger to realize they are breaking the law.

But what about that third element in the American guarantee – the right to pursue happiness?

Through this blog, I have been attempting to voice many of the things I have discovered that all of you are concerned about. In this article, I’ve decided to become more personal. I am going to tell you how the threat of aerial spraying is affecting my life and the happiness of my own family.

This year, I turned 35. Veganreader.com was my idea of making an effort to celebrate my own life and to try to share with others the basic tenets of compassion which are the root of what is called the ‘vegan’ diet. I wanted to make this blog a place where people would be inspired to live lives of kindness, of consideration, of appreciation for the gift of life and a beautiful planet.

I have been a vegan for more than half my lifetime, now. It is no longer a ‘choice’ for me, really. It is just who I am and how I go about my day. And, basically, what that involves is a way of eating and shopping that strives not to support my own life at the expense of others’ lives. But, it involves more than that. I believe that true veganism revolves around a deep thankfulness for creation and a sincere wish to keep the world in usable shape for future generations. By attempting to cause as little suffering to others as possible, I am expressing my care for all life, and trying to be a good guest on the planet.

The Vegan Path

Since I was a very small child, I have been keenly aware of the suffering of others. It hurts me deeply. When I first learned about things like the suffering of the Jewish people in World War II, or the indignities suffered by Black Americans throughout the history of the United States, or the genocide of this country’s earlier inhabitants, some of whom are my family’s ancestors, I began to suffer with them. How could people behave this way to one another, I wondered? I began having nightmares in childhood about these terrible truths, and images of these horrors continue to appear in my dreams in adulthood.

As I got older, I began to discern that there is a difference between incidental and intentional violence. Surely, deer suffer agony when they are killed by mountain lions, but this is nature. Surely, human beings suffer when they are the victims of natural disasters such as tornadoes or floods. But, again, this is nature. While I can see the pain of these things as great and tragic, they do not signal in my spirit the kind of abhorrence I feel when suffering is caused by human intention. Many world religions believe that some suffering is a necessary part of life, but few see this as an invitation to knowingly cause harm. When there are two choices before a person, and one will cause harm and the other will avoid harm, and that person chooses the former, we are witnessing sin, evil, immorality, or whatever word you might use to describe such a choice.

It was this realization that put me on the vegan path as a young girl – a path of choices made under the agreement with myself that my life was not more valuable, inherently, than the life of a neighbor being, and so I would not demand that someone else suffer so that I could live, if I could possibly help it. What does this mean? It means I won’t take an animal’s life to promote my own. It also means that I will not demand that a fellow human live the way I do. I assume that each of us is on our own path, and that the craving of all our hearts, man and beast, is to be left in freedom to make our own choices.

I sincerely respond to the teachings of humanitarians like Gandhi, like Jesus, like Native American elders which proclaim us all to be children of God, and I have come to understand sin as being a willful act which interferes with our ability to enjoy that safety, that assurance, that freedom of belonging to a Creator and living in a way we feel would please that Creator. When people murder, when they assault, when they harm others, they are acting as though the children of the earth are for their use rather than God’s. I think this is a grave error.

My Pursuit of Happiness

Life has been tough. I have survived many encounters with violence, with immorality, with evil. Like so many women in America, I have had to fight for my survival in a society that has little care for the rights or safety of female people. And, like so many of you, the toxicity of the environment has caused great damage to my health. In my twenties, I acquired 4 environmental/autoimmune illnesses, to the bafflement of doctors who could not understand how a woman with a diet as optimum and conspicuously free of toxins as mine could possibly have become so ill. Something in the air? Something in the water? No one could give me an answer.

I was bedridden for some five years with very painful conditions and my former life and former hopes for the future vanished, almost overnight, because of an onslaught of some invisible enemy. My existence became monk-like, and my acquaintance with the reality of suffering grew daily more intimate. When I think back now to those years when I was barely able to cook for myself, groom myself, get from one room of my house to another, I am filled with amazement that I survived.

Yet, here I am, writing this article, and very much alive, and much of this I owe to the man who came into my life, offered to become my husband and take care of me. Though it is unlikely that I can ever expect to be free of pain and other physical sufferings, under the devoted care of my husband, my quality of life began to improve. In solidarity, he adopted a vegan diet, I taught him to cook, and he has helped put many healthy pounds on my once-wasted body. He feeds me constantly! What a blessing when I am too unwell to be standing at the stove. In his company, I am confident once again in being out in nature, not having to fear that I will become unwell somewhere on my own, far from help. He has given me hundreds and hundreds of days in the healing sunshine, time to rest, and permission to be sick when I am sick and opportunity to make the most of my good days.

Those precious good days began to mount up and at last, I realized that I could begin to make plans again for my future – something I had given up on during those dark days of unremitting pain. My husband and I searched our hearts and found a shared dream there. Our dream for our life may sound rather plain to some, but we decided that as soon as we could, we would find a little home with some land around it and begin to grow our own food. We have talked endlessly, now, about our tiny organic farm and the sustainability this would bring to our lives, freeing us of dependence on agribusiness and its devastating pollution of the planet.

All last year, we poured over craigslist and the classifieds looking for a small country home to rent where we could start pursuing our very best ideas of happiness.

And Then Came The Spray

If I were a fatalist, I’d be saying, “I knew this would happen the minute I started trying to make plans for my future!” It seems a very cruel sort of irony that the moment the first chance in my adult life arrives for me to begin realizing a dream, a plan comes along which says:

1) You will suffer toxic assault
2) Organic farming will no longer be possible

If I had a greater idea of my own importance, I would be suspicious that the California Department of Food and Agriculture devised their aerial spray ‘program’ to try to wipe me out, personally. I am to prepare to slip back into utter debility? I am not to grow edible food?

But I know it isn’t personal. It isn’t about what this attack has done to my burgeoning dreams after a difficult life, or your dreams after whatever kinds of struggles you have known. It is completely impersonal, this attack, and is being instigated out of a brother’s private greed and misunderstanding of the value of life. These brothers don’t even see us in their pursuit of wealth and professional advancement. They are that blind.

And this is why VeganReader.com completely shifted purposes. As I stood amongst the imminent wreckage of my own life, I looked around and saw that all of you were suffering. Nothing has hurt me more in this than to see each one of you ignored, devalued, checked off a list as worthless. I know that, like me, each of you has been trying to live your life, but that all of your plans are being derailed by CDFA’s insistence that only its plan counts. 7 million of us are being told to step aside so that one misguided man can pursue his idea of happiness.

And, of course, that is against the law.

The United States constitution guarantees every one of us at least the pursuit, the chase, the endeavor. But how can I follow my star when pursuing health and organic sustainability is my goal in a land where poison coats every inch of my body and my environment? How can I be happy being poisoned? How can I have anything for myself and my family if some other person has determined to deprive me?

What I want to do with my life will not hurt anyone. In point of fact, it will help heal our wounded environment and take money away from the very people in agribusiness who are poisoning us. But now I have to face evil again – face the fact that someone thinks I belong to them for their use instead of my Creator’s. Face the fact that a man like A.G. Kawamura believes all of California and all of its people were created for his special use, to the exclusion of the rights of all others.

The world has seen this type of arrogance before, this audacity and ignorance. This is the mentality that made the Jews, the African Americans, the Native Americans, expendable in the name of progress and private fortune. Here is evil, again.

And what about my organic farm? What about my one chance to live my life here on planet Earth? As a person with a compromised immune system, I work very hard to make the most of my time here. But where is the point in being given this time in California when happiness is stolen away from my family, in utter violation of the law? Life, without the pursuit of happiness, has just become very bleak.