January
1996
How
to Be An Activist
An Interview with Lawrence Carter-Long
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Lawrence Carter-Long has a decade of experience in activist activities
on both grassroots and national levels. From his beginnings as an award
winning writer on his high school newspaper to a leader of Southeastern
Louisiana Universities student disability caucus — which successfully
implemented improved accessibility to the campus years before the passage
of the Americans with Disabilities Act, he has repeatedly demonstrated
his strength and commitment to progressive social change on a variety
of fronts.
In recent years, Lawrence has served as a mentor to disabled teens in
Washington, DC area and as the Director of a patient-based project for
the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, the Education Director
for Friends of Animals in NYC and the Program Director for the American
Anti-Vivisection Society. In addition to the dozens of radio and television
appearances Lawrence has made on behalf of animal protection issues,
he has been sought out as an authority on disability and public health
concerns, including a nationally televised appearance on the Today Show
in 1992 which examined the Jerry Lewis telethon controversy.
Q: You’re a communication specialist. How should animal
advocates talk to people, especially those supportive of vivisection?
A: First, we have to realize that health care, medicine,
and science are important issues to a lot of people. Anybody that’s
ever taken an aspirin can talk about it. Anybody whose mother has suffered
through heart disease or arthritis, or whose uncle has suffered from
cancer has an interest in this. Because we are all potential patients,
we all have a right to speak out.
Q: So, you mean we don’t have to be experts?
A: I mean you don’t need the benefit of being
a former cerebral palsy poster child to talk about these issues effectively.
(laughs)
Q: But, how do you talk to people when the subject of vivisection
is framed in terms of "your baby or your dog?"
A: The most important thing is to build bridges and
make connections with people. I can’t stress this enough. Talk
to them about vivisection in a manner they’ve never heard before.
People are accustomed to hearing the argument of "your baby versus
your dog." That’s what the animal experimentation industry
and people who perform vivisection want them to believe. It makes their
work easier.
Take that concept, which is already in people’s minds, and rework
it, turn it on its ear. Ask whether we want to spend $300,000 a year
getting monkeys addicted to crack cocaine, or whether we want to treat
humans who are suffering with that type of addiction. Where are our
priorities? Do we want to be treating people addicted to crack cocaine
who want to get off the stuff; or do we want to keep addicting these
monkeys? We know about the physiological complications of crack addiction.
But experiments with animals are never going to touch the psychological,
sociological, and financial aspects which go into why someone becomes
addicted to crack in the first place. They can’t touch that.
Those are the problems we need to be solving.
For example, let’s go back to the question of your baby or the
dog. This is what you could say: "In the mid eighties there was
an arthritis drug called Oraflex that was tested on dogs, cats —
you name it — on up through primates at seven times the maximum
tolerated human dosage. No ill side effects were found. When this drug
was given to human beings, over 150 people died of fatal liver damage
in the U.S. alone, many more died in Europe."
My question to those who support animal testing is: "What do you
say to those individuals who lost their mothers, their brothers, their
grandmothers, due to this drug? Oops, we tried it on a rat? That’s
not good enough. Yes, we can give the drugs to animals and they’re
going to react differently physiologically. Then, in the case of a
drug
like Oraflex or FIAU, the drug eventually ends up killing people. Are
you willing to accept the responsibility for that because you believe
that we should be doing animal experimentation?"
In this way the question applies to your life and the life of the person
you’re talking with. We need to reframe these questions and comment
in ways which make it easy for somebody to see what the inaccuracies
or inconsistencies with animal tests are. If we start talking about
these issues in a way that it means something to somebody, people start
thinking, "Well, maybe that’s not the best way to do it." Then
we can make some changes. But we have to have the guts to stand up
and be willing to reframe it. We have to be able to think on our
feet.
Bear in mind that we are all much more similar than we are different.
Whether you are talking to non-vegetarians, or vivisectors, furriers,
or whoever it may be, there are probably many more similarities than
there are differences between us. We need to work from where those similarities
and commonalities are.
When I debate with vivisectors, I always end with a question which
I want not only the vivisector to think about, but also the audience
to
ponder as well: "Are there any areas, regardless of how you feel
about this issue and what we talked about tonight — in entertainment,
education, testing, food production — where you feel the use of
animals is inappropriate?" My follow up question to that is, "If
there are; what will you do to help me stop them?"
What that does is to put the onus on them, and lets them move forward
from a place where they are most comfortable. When I’ve asked
that question to vivisectors, some have come out and said they’re
absolutely against product testing and they’d do whatever they
could to stop it, while they might feel that cancer research is necessary.
Am I going to tell them no? Am I going to say, "Well, don’t
feel compassionate about this issue because you don’t go as far
as I think you should go." No. What we have to do is bring people
on as much as we can. As we do that the humane community will get bigger
and more and more changes will occur.
Q: You’ve recently been exploring the issue of burn-out
among activists. What are your recommendations for avoiding it?
A: When somebody’s getting it together on an
issue and getting motivated, we say that they’re "fired up,"
or they’re "hot." When they’re not so "fired
up" let’s say, a year or two later, we say that they are
"burned out." This happened with me in the Fall of 1993, and
I started to ask, "How does that happen?" And this is what
I discovered. When we go into activism, when we first start learning
about what is occurring with animals — or anything really —
we become angry and incensed. Because we’re finding out all this
information we never heard about before. But, we expect that because
we’re fired up we’re going to go out and tell our friends
and neighbors and they’re going to get just as incensed. What
happens is that they are not in the same space we are, spiritually or
psychologically, whatever it might be. It is here that our expectations
begin to take a beating. It is here that burn-out begins. It’s
good to remember that not everyone’s going to go vegan overnight.
So don’t expect it. It took me two years.
I was raised in Indiana, in farm country, and vegetarianism was the
weirdest thing in the world to me. What happened was that I saw an
autopsy
and they pulled lard out this guy’s heart: he was 42 years old
and weighed about 400 pounds. I got concerned about my own heart and
said to myself, "I don’t want to be eating this stuff."
The guy who did the autopsy said that it was bacon and eggs and all
those kind of things that did it. I started reading every kind of thing
I could on diet, voraciously, one of which was Radical Vegetarianism.
I believe I was still in the preface when the author, Marc Braunstein,
asked: "What right do we have to kill an animal simply to feast
on its burnt, dead flesh?" Stopped me cold: I’d never thought
about it before. And I asked myself, "Why do I do that?" And
I came up with two answers: it was habit, something I’d been raised
to do and always done; and I liked the taste. I kept reading the book,
found out about battery hens, veal, the types of production and the
suffering that goes on. I tried to put myself in that animal’s
place. I realized it wasn’t necessary to eat meat. I had never
heard of any vegetarian dropping dead of malnutrition but knew that
plenty of people eating flesh foods were dying of heart disease and
cancer and obesity. So, I kept asking, "What’s wrong with
this picture?" and decided that if I put myself in the position
of that battery hen then it wasn’t good enough that I just liked
the taste. That was it. It came back to responsibility: if you don’t
like it, stop.
Q: How do you prepare for your debates?
A: Before I speak anywhere I sit down and come up
with five points of attack. I don’t care what they ask me, I
get into those five points of attack. It helps to anticipate what they
might
throw your way.
I once did this TV news segment called "The Hot Seat" on WOR
here in New York, in which the interviewer throws all these questions
at you, trying to make you nervous. He tried every trick in the book.
I remember him yelling, "There were several people naked out there.
How far are you people willing to go!?" And I looked at him and
replied:
"You covered the story, didn’t you? Who was hurt? As long
as you keep covering the story, we’re going to keep doing it.
Why? Because it’s a way to bring people into the issue and in
a way that maybe they haven’t seen or heard before. Why are these
people going naked? The fact of the matter is the animals don’t
get a choice. They’re stripped bare of their skin. They’re
dead. If we can do something to wake somebody up and think about that
in a different manner, and you cover us; you are partly responsible
for that." It looked natural, but what he couldn’t know is
that I’d rehearsed that lil’ give-n-take with my girlfriend
just a few hours before. That’s what we need to do: anticipate
and prepare.
With anything we do, as we try to communicate with people, we should
try to make them aware of their own responsibility. And we also need
to know our responsibilities. I’m not of the opinion that all
press is good press, that’s nonsense. We’re not always going
to be speaking to other animal rights activists. We could be fine and
dandy sitting in our little cloistered rooms talking to each other.
But if this movement’s ever going to get anywhere, we need to
understand how our message is coming across to other people and approach
them from that space. We’ll never progress if we’re always
offending those we need to convert.
Q: Sometimes it seems tough feeling so isolated.
A: Right. It’s like a ministry: we can’t
get away from it. You go to the movies: there’s an animal being
abused in the movie. You start to go out to eat: they’re serving
veal. You’re on the way home from the movie: you find a stray
cat. It’s in your life, every day, and that’s a very difficult
thing. And you can’t just turn it off. You have to realize that
when you say, "I’m an animal rights activist." You need
to know that these pressures are going to build up. First, you have
to be aware that this is going to occur and, second, be very mindful
of where you’re at and what your limits are. Say to yourself,
"You know what? I’m going to mail these five letters, and
then I’m going to the movies." Because if you’re not
recharging your batteries or giving yourself a break and bringing something
into your life that is empowering and enriching, you’re not going
to have anything to give to the animals.
What you have to do is to pat yourself on the back for the small gains
you can get. Keep working to make each incremental step mean something.
That means that if someone changes the brand of toothpaste they buy,
that’s a great thing. If somebody says, "You know what? I’m
not going to buy veal anymore," that’s a great thing. Maybe
after they make that step, they’ll make another step. But they’re
not going to do it if you cram it down their throat.
Q: Is burn-out partly a result of living in an indifferent
culture which values conformity over individuality?
A: In our culture, vegetarianism and animal advocacy
are still a little "out there" and it’s difficult for
people to make changes because we’re all supposed to wear the
same jeans with the name on the rear end and we all want the proper
haircut or whatever. That’s what we’re told to get. You
step outside of those lines or paradigm and it becomes difficult. That’s
why we look for some sort of confirmation for these changes. And it’s
really crucial we give it to people: "How is that going? Are you
having any problems?" People say, "I just can’t imagine
eating tofu." I mean, I was there once. I looked at this stuff
and I said, "Looks like Styrofoam." I tasted it raw, it tasted
pretty much like I expect Styrofoam to taste. And I thought, "God,
how can anybody eat this?" But I learnt more about tofu and how
it’s an amazing food which will absorb the flavor of anything
you put with it if you cook it correctly. And I think we need to tell
people what to expect.
Q: That it’s not all roses?
A: Well, that it’s not necessarily easy to make
this change. I was once asked during a debate on the Internet by a woman
who was very upset: "Why is it," she said, "that if a
lion is able to go out and eat a gazelle then I can’t have a steak?"
She was angry about that. And I said, "The question isn’t
how I can be more like a lion; but how I can be more compassionate
as
a human. How can I make this world a better place; how can I limit
suffering to the greatest degree possible?"
Q: But we shouldn’t see vegetarianism as a deprivation,
right?
A: We’re giving something up, but we’re
also giving something back and it’s more than worth it. The suffering
we’re not causing is an amazing amount. The self-satisfaction,
knowing that you’re not contributing to that death, is something
we should be very proud of. We as humans are blessed with the capacity
to make a choice. We can say, "No, I will not do this." A
lion can’t, as far as I know. People ask me whether I feel all
animals are the same. I don’t feel that. I’m not saying
that rats should vote, or that dogs should drive cars, or that we should
chase down gazelles and rip them open with our bare teeth. But we should
recognize the differences and yet understand that the common thread
is that we all should have the right to be alive and not be harmed.
I come back to the big word: responsibility. When you realize what kind
of a mess this planet’s in and what our wanton consumerism has
done, you begin to realize that we have to develop and cultivate and
facilitate something greater. My vegetarianism and animal activism is
a large part of that. It’s not the whole pie, but it’s
a big chunk.
If we’re able to look at that and say, "Look, how I’m
bringing more life, more verve, and less suffering into the world:"
is that not a good thing? So, when people ask me, "What are you
trying to do? Just what are you people trying to do?" I tell them
straight out. "My goal is to eliminate suffering. It is to not
cause suffering as much as I can. Isn’t that a good thing?"
Q: We should stop being defensive?
A: At some point we need to stop being defensive and
begin to own our choices. If someone asks me why I am a vegetarian,
I warn them, "If you really want to talk about this, you’re
giving me a half hour. You’re not asking me why I’m vegetarian,
you’re not going to ask me what’s going to happen to all
the cows and then turn around and walk away. If you really want to get
into this, let’s get into it, let’s really talk about it."
I do this because often when we talk about vegetarianism and start
to give people information they might find uncomfortable, they turn
around
and want to leave and stay in denial about what really goes on. So
I say, "Look, I’ll talk if you’re willing to dialogue
about this, if we really do talk," and give them the option to
continue. Sometimes they will, sometimes they won’t, but at least
you’re going into it with your eyes open.
People need to cultivate a willingness to question everything. Not only
their old habits but their new habits as well. We must question our
animal rights activism, our self righteousness; the way we approach
other people; the way people hear and see us and we them.
Lawrence is currently managing a campaign against the Inhalation
Toxicology Research Institute (ITRI) for Sangre de Cristo Animal Protection,
Inc. (SdeCAP) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The ITRI facility relies
on
Department of Energy funding to force rats, mice, beagles and non-human
primates to inhale and ingest radioactive substances at taxpayer expense.
If you have any comments or questions in regards to this interview,
or if you’d like further details on The Coalition for Research
Ethics and Accountability (CREA) which was created to address the health,
environmental and ethical impact of ITRI’s experiments, please
contact Lawrence at: The Coalition for Research Ethics and Accountability,
P.O. Box 11395, Albuquerque, NM 87192. You can also send electronic
mail via the Internet to: SdeCAP@aol.com.
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