This is an entirely apolitical post, but I thought I would share it anyway. I am reminded of it every Easter. A family that is close to ours used to have a Crawfish Boil every Good Friday. One year, there was a crawfish in the huge bucket that was talking around injured. His daughter said “That crawfish is in pain. You should kill it, Daddy! It’s hurting…”
To which the father, “Sweetie, how do you think it feels when we put the crawfish into the boiling water?”
The girl paused, looked confused, looked at the bucket of crawfish crawling around on top of one another, and burst into tears. The father burst into panic.
I think both the father and daughter learned something that day.
It’s probably because I don’t have a daughter that I find this story hilarious.
David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster comes to mind.
Why is it that euthanasia is such a blindingly obvious moral choice for a crawfish that a little girl can arrive at that conclusion almost intuitively, but when it comes to human beings, we agonize over the issue?
Probably for the same reason we feel okay about eating crawfish and not eating people.
Hannah would probably say, “Daddy, that crawfish is hurting. Boil it quick so we can eat it.”
Some children are conflicted, others are sort of brutally cavalier about this sort of thing. Hannah took death quite readily in stride.