Does safety undermine bravery? (Podcast)

Alexandra Paul went from Baywatch actor to rescue activist and political defendant. Here's how it all began – and what we can learn from her on what it means to be brave.

The actor Alexandra Paul started walking into dangerous places when she was in her early 20s. In the 1990s, she crossed into the forbidden zone at a nuclear test site to take a stand for world peace. In the early 2000s, she blocked the truck carrying electric cars to be demolished, as authorities threatened to crush the EV1s that were one of our best hopes for a carbon free future. And in the 2010s, she began walking into factory farms filled with suffering and bloodshed – and walking out with animals on the brink of death. 

• Hear these stories and more in my conversation with Alexandra on the Green Pill Podcast!

How did she muster the courage to do these things? If you listen to Alexandra, the answer is safety. The safety she’s felt in life – a middle class family, supportive parents, and eventually the privilege of being an actor in Baywatch (the most watched show on Earth in its heyday) – allowed her to take these risks. Where other people might feel vulnerable, Alexandra’s safety inspired her to be brave. 

But when I was talking to Alexandra in this podcast, I started observing something different about her story. What if Alexandra has it backwards?

What if her bravery caused her safety, and not vice versa?

What I mean is this: when you start breaking down Alexandra’s story, you realize there were many parts of her life that were very unsafe. For one, her entire family was threatened when her brother Jonathan Paul, in the 1990s, was thrown in jail for his nonviolent animal rights activism. She was dragged out of the courtroom for begging the judge to reconsider her brother’s incarceration. (Jonathan Paul was ultimately sentenced to 4 years in prison.) For another, she was in an industry that was notoriously dangerous for young women — Hollywood — and experienced harassment that would make most of us gasp, e.g., being asked by a producer of a film she was shooting to join a threesome.

This doesn’t sound like a very safe life. But even in the face of all these threats, Alexandra continued to take huge risks. And maybe, just maybe, it was her willingness to take on these risks that made Alexandra the joyous, self-confident, and centered person she is today. 

So which is it? Does safety make people brave? Or does bravery make us safe?

You’ll be hearing more about this subject, in the weeks and months to come. First and foremost, that’s because I’ve come across a body of research, in what psychiatrist’s call exposure therapy, that seems crucial for anyone interested in making positive change. This theory’s pioneer, psychiatrist Joseph Wolpe, is one of the intellectual heroes of the last 100 years; his story, of curing war veterans suffering from horrific post traumatic stress disorder by exposing them to things that caused them to feel unsafe, must be told. Stay tuned for more on that.

But the other reason I’ll be sharing more about the tension between safety and bravery is that I am taking on huge risks myself, with my co-defendant Paul Picklesimer, as we refuse offers to plea bargain and face off against the largest pig farm in the world in our September trial. And this trial is not just about the abuses we found at Smithfield Foods, the Chinese pig farming conglomerate, that is seeking to have us imprisoned for years. It’s about a larger political principle: is the public — is our entire species — ready to face the disturbing truth about where our “meat” comes from?

That might not be an appetizing truth. It might not be a comfortable one. It might actually make many people feel unsafe.

But as Alexandra’s story shows, confronting this truth, though it might make us feel unsafe, just might be crucial to saving the world.

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I noted recently on Facebook that I am going to start publishing newsletters on a regular schedule: Friday and Tuesday. This week, the newsletter is coming out a little late in the day. But expect future newsletters to come out around 10 am PT. And, as promised, this newsletter will do its best to make the content participatory, i.e., I want to know what your thoughts are, and what subjects you’d like to hear more about, to make this newsletter as valuable to the reader as it can be!

• Next Friday’s blog, chosen by you, will focus on community. Thanks to everyone who filled out our last survey regarding what content you’d like to see in this newsletter and blog. The overwhelming winner was, “How to find community in a disconnected world.” That will be the subject of a piece I write next week — and a community event we host next Friday.

• An important podcast for animal rights that has nothing to do with animals. I’m going to be spending much more time on what’s unfolding in Utah, as the Smithfield trial approaches. And certainly, Smithfield has been in the news. From COVID-19 cover-ups to price-fixing scandals, the company can’t seem to avoid ethical controversy. But perhaps the most important thing I read or heard in the last week, for people who care about animal rights, had nothing at all to do with animals. Rather, it was a podcast by Ezra Klein on the nature of law. In the post-Roe era, Ezra and his guest, former Stanford Law dean Larry Kramer, argue that legal interpretation should not be exclusive domain of judges. Instead, our understanding of law, and especially our deepest constitutional principles, must be a subject of broader community interpretation. This has deep relevance for animal rights, as trial approaches, because it’s important for us all to understand that what happens in the courtroom is just the beginning of the story. What really matters, in establishing animal personhood or the right to rescue, is how the community responds. And that, to a large extent, depends on me and you.

• What do you want to read about next? I’m interested in what you’d like me to write about next. Here’s a survey with three possibilities. Take a minute and choose the one you think would be best!