From personal experience, I sense acidic undercurrents, a bursting bubble, and a rusted infrastructure; a western world that is growing, yet sinking. All these forms of decay make me speculate on how things got to be this way, but also what I should do in an attempt to change the tide. In David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster,” I am consistently puzzled on his concept regarding animals’ ‘right to life’ deeming some sort of equality in animal lives compared to human lives. A selection from this text that that sticks out to me and could stand alone as the main point of this text is when Wallace talks about how people would never stand around at a food festival where cows are publicly slaughtered. He says, “Try to imagine a Nebraska Beef Festival at which part of the festivities is watching the trucks pull up and the live cattle get driven down the ramp and slaughtered right there on the World’s Largest Killing Floor or something - there’s no way” (Wallace 24?). Here, Wallace makes the point that as people we obviously have a natural notion to point at a mass killing of life and point out that it is wrong.
Where, as Westerners, are our priorities? I am alluding to the fact that in America there have been at least 59 million reported babies that have been aborted since Roe v. Wade in 1973. In Wallace’s text, he seems to equate the necessity to care about the suffering of lobsters to the suffering of humans in regards to the fact that there are ethical ways to dealing