Cast
Man: Male, 40s. Quiet and introspective but in an emotional state.

Scene
I hate cruelty. If there’s one thing I’ve always hated, it’s cruelty. I’m a peaceful person. I keep to myself, and I’m polite, and I never hurt others. By others, I extend my definition to all living creatures. Obviously I eat plants, because you have to to survive, but I won’t cut down trees because they’re dropping leaves or whatever. I just want to tread lightly and be kind to others.

My hatred for cruelty started young. I was a small kid growing up. Others used to pick on me. When you’re young, manners get you nowhere. The only thing that matters is your size and strength. Parents and teachers tell you to be polite and watch your language, but we’re really just cavemen at that age. All kids want to do is dominate each other. It’s a complex dynamic, but you watch kids play and there’s always the bigger ones and the smaller ones and that’s all that really matters to them. You only start caring about things like tact and decorum when you get older, and while I was the definite exception to this rule, it didn’t stop me getting beaten up.

I was – and still am – the anomaly. I always hated cruelty. It disgusted me, right from when I was a kid. I was a small kid, and the bullies picked on me all the time. I took it on the chin, mostly, except this one time when I fought back. See, they say shy people are firecrackers in bed, and that still waters run deep, but all of this is really about repression. I’d repressed a lot of anger when I was a kid and those bullies squeezed it all out of me one day. I’ve even forgotten his name but he was two grades above me and he called me a pussy and pushed me every time we were near each other. He fed off my weakness, I suppose you’d say. One ordinary day he pushed me and I flew off the rails. Bam! I hit him in the face, his cheek tearing open like wet meat. I hit him three more times and he lost teeth.

Funnily enough, we didn’t stay in touch. I’m sure he wears a beard now. As much as he deserved it, violence begets violence and I was disgusted by what I did. I don’t know why I never looked up his name and apologised to him. Fear, I guess.

Being a victim, I was always sympathetic to the weak and vulnerable. So it was fitting that at sixteen I stopped eating meat. One day I was looking at a chicken breast and thought, ‘This is the flesh of a chicken.’ I was eating something’s breast! It was like eating a human breast. I imagined my own ribs being torn apart and the flesh cooked. I am meat myself. Meat eating meat. It seemed so, so cannibalistic. I said to my dad, ‘Dad, I don’t want to eat chicken any more.’ Dad looked at me funny. ‘Why not?’ he asked, tearing at his drumstick. ‘I just don’t,’ I replied. ‘I don’t think I have to.’ Dad frowned at me. ‘Son, let me tell you something. Our God is a cruel one. He made life to be sustained by other life. That chicken eats worms and bugs and we eat the chicken. It’s all part of a cycle.’

As compelling as dad’s speech was, I didn’t eat any more chicken, and this quickly extended to cows, pigs and even fish. I didn’t sustain myself by eating animals. They’re helpless and we can survive without them. Decades later it amazes me there’s anyone left in the world who would still eat meat. Why willingly choose to kill when you could do otherwise? It sickens me, honestly. But I’m a kind person and I don’t want to impose my beliefs on others. My dad never liked it, but he was good enough to let me go vego in a place where this was completely unheard of. Live and let live, he said, and that’s how I live today. We can live and let live.

But I didn’t agree with all of dad’s philosophies. I didn’t agree that God was cruel. God is the dictionary opposite of cruel. He is all about peace and togetherness. What I never liked was a hypocrite, like those madmen who blow up abortion clinics. You can’t save a life that way. But what’s even worse than a mere hypocrite is a monster. A disgusting creature that would hurt something for its own pleasure. Killing for food because you have to eat is one thing, hurting for pleasure is another thing altogether let me assure you. Violence, aggression, sexual crimes: they make me sick. I don’t like to hear about this stuff, I really don’t. It just upsets me.

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