Not letting the side down

All of us are trained from childhood to make judgements of other people - if someone seems bad or stupid or weak our judging of them makes us feel better about ourselves. We like to feel superior. It’s a god-on-my-side feeling. But by being vegan we are also trying to win recognition of the principle. It should never be about me and my enlightened position but about the crime of animal exploitation and the abolition of enslavement. Therefore we need to get a lot of people on side. We certainly shouldn’t be judging others, since we might damage the whole animal rights movement if we do. If we think we have right on our side we may make ourselves unpopular - as vegans we represent others’ interests. It’s not just our own reputation we have to think about but the reputation and safety of all concerned. By judging those who aren’t like us, it puts them off us. It turns them away from a particular way of thinking that they might have come round to in time anyway.
Memory plays tricks on us if we think that we’ve always been vegan. Apart from a very few who’ve been vegan from birth we all came from another viewpoint and along the way we’ve changed. Is it possible that we might NOT have become vegan if we’d met up with a judgemental vegan, who seemed too unattractive to identify with.
Feeling safe as a vegan should cancel out any need to be judgemental. The violence in our society is a reaction to being thought of as inferior, so we mustn’t encourage that if we don’t want to add to the problem. Violence comes out of a wish to make others feel inferior. Why would we want to do that? We’ve been taught that a dose of violence keeps people in their place or it can drag people up to our level – we presume others need improving and that we don’t? And all this is based on judgement, aggression and a disregard for the non-violence principle.