A comment about protests

Just now I was checking the status of some uneaten ice cream in the refrigerator and some of it is far beyond its "use by" date, so I washed one of the containers' contents down the drain. As I did I thought of one of my stories from youth that I could tell my readers, to help them to understand my perspectives and better formulate their own values and opinions.

When I was a kid there was some sort of very contentious quarrel between dairy farmers who produced milk and I think the state government, though it could have been the federal. As you may know government policy has an influence on what farmers can obtain for their products.

Anyway, the debate became very heated and to my horror the dairy farmers decided to protest by dumping milk into the ground! Their point was that the milk was worthless to them because of the pricing policy they were protesting. This, however, is one of the images that has seared my brain and bothers me to this day about how humans decide to do things like protests, regardless of the provocation.

I still to this day do not understand why they did not "destroy" the milk in protest by giving it free to poor and undernourished children for a day. If they were going to discard the milk they had produced for an entire day, why did they not donate that milk to an agency that needed it?

I'm sure I'd hear all sorts of excuses such as the cost of pasteurizing milk that they would just give away. But if you are going to protest and emphasize the value of milk, a basic life giving food, why protest by pouring it unused into the ground? I was and still remain horrified by that image of total waste and nihilism by people who were otherwise "salts of the earth."

If they do not think of that simple and positive protest alternative, how much farther from them are the people who are unbelieving, who are liberal secular worshippers, who are "angry" advocates of this or that "outrage?" How will people ever really rise up in their worthiness if even the good people think that destroying a life giving commodity is the answer? It's sad, the terrible waste I have seen over the decades that I have been here, observing, and being buffeted by cruelty also.