One Can Make a Difference by Ingrid Newkirk Read Free Book Online Page B

or mentally. Once Sue Coe draws you inside them, through her work, any comfortable view of the world you might have had is whisked away. Somehow, too, her work is alive with sounds. Opening her book, Sheep of Fools , I can hear the sheep boarding the multitiered, open-decked ships taking them to the markets of the Middle East; in How to Commit Suicide in South Africa I can even hear the escaping breath of the men who, because of the color of their skin, are sent plummeting into the abyss. The sounds aren’t there on the page, but I hear them; that is how powerfully she paints.
    Sue believes her paintings are beautiful for reasons she explains in this verse:
    Are these pictures all too dark for you?
    Too much black? Too much blue?
    Too much squalor?
    Too much crime in this landscape of our time?
    Then open your eyes, X out their lies, and work with your minds, your hearts, your sinews for a better world.
    It would seem many people are keen to embrace Sue’s “better world.” Trained at the prestigious Royal College of Art in London, her work has appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times , the New Yorker , Art News , Time , Newsweek , and Mother Jones . Her paintings have been included in the permanent collections of countless museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, and the Arts Council of Great Britain. Yet in spite of all her acclaim, what Sue really cares about is telling the truth.
    O ur house, when I was growing up, was in front of a hog factory farm, and one block away from a slaughterhouse. The pigs were kept in steel sheds. In front of the sheds was a chained German shepherd; he was chained for my entire childhood. The chain would rattle and get caught up in the dog’s legs. Lights would go on in the sheds at night, illuminating our bedroom, and the pigs would start to scream. It was a very rundown place, and my sister and I were scared of the German shepherd. There were a lot of rats, and they would get the exterminator to come and put down poison. In the morning, we would find moles that had been killed, and would examine their soft fur and perfect paws.
    One day, a small pig escaped the slaughterhouse, and she ran in and out of the traffic, desperate to get away. Men in white aprons, covered in blood, ran after her. Small groups of people congregated to watch, and they started to laugh and point. I asked my mother why this was so funny, and she said it was not funny, the pig was going to be caught and killed. My parents grew up in England during World War II and always told me that they didn’t know about the death camps; what the Fascists had done came as a total shock. They survived the German bombs as teenagers, and because of this, everything in their lives was related to the war. Many buildings where we lived outside of London were still in ruins, entire rooms would be exposed, showing a fireplace, and photographs on the mantelpiece, staircases intact, but no walls. Our questions as children weren’t really answered about how this could have happened, but even without their input I made the connection between the hell of the war and the hell of what was going on next door to us.
    When it came time to slaughter the pigs, which would happen every six months or so, there would be a terrible noise at night. They’d whip the pigs to get them into the truck, and they would go down the road to the slaughterhouse. I wanted to know why this was happening, and my parents said this was “food” and to “grow up,” and not worry about it. Yet here we were, living next door to a death camp, but for a different species. And then I started to understand why this could happen, how we humans can develop a mechanism to deny reality. Our behaviors are learned for the most part, and we learn early on as children that some lives are lesser than others. A spider web can be torn down, a mouse trapped, a frog dissected,