Stoopid, omnivores are not

Can I be really honest here? Can I say what needs to be said? Is it not true that we, as vegans, feel so frustrated that we want to hit out. And who else at but omnivores (our friends and the people we often talk with are almost entirely omnivore)? The ordinary consumers, the ‘man in the street’, we know they stand in the way of progress on this issue. We want to implicate them with wrong-doing. We want them to connect what they buy with what the Animal Industry does ... which we go to great lengths to describe. The cruelties, etc.
Our hitting out takes on subtle forms. We don’t shake people or abuse them, that would be assault. No, it only needs a little ‘implication’; we don’t have to be very explicit. It’s easy to plant the food-animal connection and then suggest disapproval. And even then we only need to raise an eyebrow. That’s how we show disapproval.
We hate, all of us, being disapproved of. It’s as if we’re invalid, so omnivores, when they hear what we say, know what we’re trying to imply. Omnivores are not stupid. They add two and two together and probably think “I’m being told that if I eat from animals I’m implicated in killing them, ouch!, that’s being preached at, and I don’t like that”.
When we (vegans) do this, we know exactly what we’re doing. We might make a bit of a joke of it. Or when they reply to something we say we then point out their obvious faux pas (having said to us something patently untrue). Our aim is to trap them, challenge them, force them to see things our way. By their wandering into our trap they experience our Shock Tactic for Jolting Awareness. People don’t like having their awareness jolted and yet we still set the trap because we think we are justified in doing that.
We reckon that, as vegans, we can get away with this, because of the rightness of our cause: we think that our intentions are ‘good’ and we’re fighting the ‘good fight’. But people have experience of this sort of thing - like all evangelists before us, our approach rings alarm bells. We’re easily spotted. It’s as if, just by our demeanour, we seem capable of being rude or even explosive.
The righteous, including vegans, think they might well be blessed ‘from above’. So, we go ahead, say what we say, intend to make them think twice about buying animal products. We say, “Before you go ahead and buy its body, be aware of what you’re actually doing”. That’s heavy. When the average omnivore hears it or reads it or just vaguely senses it, at that very moment they know ‘where it’s coming from’. They know what we’re saying, they know what we’re doing. Weighing the odds, their being in the majority versus our being in the minority, they realise we’ve blown it.
Handing out Animal Rights literature on street corners is important, but so is trying to repair some of the handy-work of previous proselytising ‘fellow travellers’. We may need to convince people that we aren’t clones of each other and that we aren’t all finger-wagging, disapprovists, out to get revenge. And we aren’t social suicides either, trying to lose friends.
Our job is to communicate. What a waste it would be if we blew it; once we actually spark interest, to then waste it by becoming somehow threatening.