Bathroom Monologue: Ahimsa

“Ahimsa is the principle of non-injury, a religious Hippocratic oath that commands you do no harm to living things. No man, woman, child, horse fly biting that child, mad cow chasing that fly, or a serpent that’s figured out how to pump a shotgun and is sick of the whole fly business. It is at least a nice principle when moderated with others, and at most a heck of a way to get into the Guinness Book of World Records. But it’s always been flawed, because micro-biotic life forms like bacteria are constantly entering the body and being killed by your immune system. You can’t stop it from happening except by killing yourself, and killing yourself would condemn all the bacteria in your intestines to death. And even your bodily cells are dying all the time. But these things didn’t matter to the ancient mystics because they didn’t know about them, and modern mystics say that made it okay. That’s where I got this idea. You see, a lot of ahimsa-believers are great people, but they’re getting sick because they don’t get enough vitamins in their vegetarian diets. Healthy vegetarianism just isn’t viable in this region of the world. But my Special Vegetarian Chili is viable. The secret? Beef. Sometimes chicken. Because they’ve never tasted it before, they don’t know what they’re eating. And because they don’t know, their ahimsa is in tact. I’m going to Hell for it, but several thousand very kind people are about to live a lot longer on my karmic bank account.”