And yet "getting attached" is quite possibly the kernel and core of what it means to be alive. If you are not helplessly attached to something, someone, someplace or even some idea, then maybe you aren't really living. That's where I have a fundamental disagreement with the Buddha. Avoiding suffering is no way to live a life. Non-attachment is not the goal, even if attachment causes suffering. Attachments make the heart sing, and I'm happy to suffer for my attachments.
Now, you might say, "if you were so attached to that steer, why didn't you save him from his fate, from being slaughtered?" But that would be to turn him into a pet and that, strangely enough - from my point of view - would be a form of disrespect. It would be to deny the biological relationship between grass/herbivore/carnivore, which is the much bigger context. Of course, that biological relationship has been massively twisted and even perverted by our civilization/economic system but deep under all the complexities and alienations that our civilization allows and imposes is an ancient relationship that is more significant than the individual lives of the plants and animals tangled together within it.
Which is all perhaps a long-winded justification, but here is the challenge: can we eat as if every bite of food had a name? As if every article of clothing or electronic gadget came from a cotton plant or vein in a mine that merited a name and all the attachment that a name implies? Can we privilege the vitality of broader ecological relationships over a concept of prosperity that only values human prosperity?
