Vague-ans are not Vegans

What is it we pick up during conversations, when dialoguing, discussing and then sometimes fighting with friends, over our ‘issue-differences’? It’s terrible. It feels like a separation sometimes, when we notice people drifting away from us.
The strengths that initially come with being vegan are the very strengths that help protect us from being abandoned. Someone asks, “Are you allowed to eat this?” and we say “Yes, we can eat anything. No rules. Just a personal choice NOT to”. It’s always a bit annoying when people say this, implying we are part of a strict group that dictates what we do and do not do - which is supposed to show their contempt for our loss of normal freedoms, like what we eat, like eating what we like. That sort of deliberate misunderstanding of our principles comes with the territory. And people, for the same reasons, like to pretend they don’t know how to pronounce the word ‘vegan’ ... ‘veggn’ or ‘vayghan’ and we have to correct them. But these are minor irritations. Their need to judge us is supposed to stop us from judging them? Who knows, but it’s fairly certain that ‘the rejection of the vegan’ is coming from the omnivore’s guilt about indulgence in ‘everything’. They know we don’t. It annoys the hell out of them.
While we’ve obviously grown out of a lot of the crap food they still eat it’s most annoying for them to see that we don’t even want it anymore. The stuff they eat that we don’t, most of it containing animal products (and therefore which make it off limits to us) makes them fat and sluggish and ill. Our boycott keeps us away from being tempted by it and that’s a tremendous advantage to vegans. Call that “self discipline” if you like, but it’s more appropriate to call it a blessed release from a daily poisoning. Even call it an “inspiration” ... whatever it is, it’s the big plus for us, when ‘going vegan’. Once that’s in place we can start a course of self-development and go ahead with ‘proselytising animal issues’.
For those people who are already vegan, the great challenge is NOT “how are we going to stick with plant-food?” (Likely we’ve already been pleasantly surprised to discover it’s easier than we expected). Once you’re actually vegan the difficulties switch to the problems of communication, namely getting ‘it all’ across to others. Then it comes down to the struggle of getting a hearing. We’re always hoping the penny will drop for our friends and family (for their sake) ... but also for our own sake. We know how fragile we can feel, keeping up our spirits, not becoming too discouraged, not having too many expectations to be disappointed ... you can see where this is leading ...
Our relationships with non-vegans often seem to be on shaky ground. We find (sometimes to our utter amazement with people we know to be intelligent) that they don’t listen to us ... not even when they know we most want them to.
At first it’s a gob-smacker. We’re chatting away, perhaps getting close to a ‘lead-in’ to this subject (“animals”, “compassion”, “food”) and suddenly we notice something happening ... “Did they just bluntly change the subject on me?”
Once we realise people don’t like talking about abattoirs (and the lead-ups) we begin to see how BIG this subject of ours is. It feels as though it has tentacles everywhere. It’s like a bank with millions of investors, who have their life savings in one ‘position’: they invest in quiet conscience, avoiding addiction and indulging double-think. They roll it all into one interest-bearing attitude. Each investor knows it’s a safe investment since it’s shared by almost every other investor on the planet. With all that security the investor can ignore the small earth tremors from “vegan principle”. They can dismiss us completely (our gobsmacked-shock not withstanding).
For us this is a surprise at first. Perhaps this is the first time people have found our passion unattractive. Oh! the indignity of being so crudely misjudged! And certainly, we don’t like being ignored. But what can we do about it? We can’t fight back directly. All we can do is reflect on our stand - resort to the inner assurances of our own moral and ethical position.
But there’s this lump in our throat. We can’t let it go. We can’t leave it there. We begin to judge and more particularly harbour grudges about those our detractors.
First we go for the big boys (usually from a safe distance), exposing those who vivisect animals or who sell cattle or factory farm or run abattoirs. Then we expose consumers. And that just about includes everybody. We make war on the world. We do it judgementally. That’s all we can do - find safety in the harbour-ing of judgements. There seems no other way open to us - to bring help to the animals and to people.
If there is a more effective way to initiate change, Animal Rights advocates might eventually choose a more non-judgemental approach. The fact is that vegans are far stronger than we sometimes realise, not in the popularity stakes but in terms of our rationale. Eventually everything gets discussed in this world, we are in the information age after all. Vegans’ strongest suit is in the values we hold. Values have almost certainly jolted us out of our own dark corners, picked us up and guided us through this most recent part of our life.
Honesty, kindness and all the things we’re hopefully brought up to believe are right, are the shining beacons in our own self-development, but what if that isn’t enough? What if we are never satisfied and want the enjoyment of harbouring our grudges - at ‘humans’?
We can waste valuable time and more importantly valuable trust if we have to vent our spleen all the time. If we choose to pick on fellow humans we are red traffic lights picking on motorists. We can appear to want to “stop” something, deny something. As vegans, green lights, we show how to “start”.
By holding judgements of people, then expanding them, nurturing them, indulging and harbouring them we’ll go nowhere. Eventually this hobby will bore us completely. We’ll be left with a crumpled, spiteful, people-loathing shell. But by dropping judgements, nudging them well out of the way, we leave things open to develop more constructively.
We already know there are so many positive things between us - on many other issues we can have such a feeling that we are all in ‘this’ together. Our common job is surely to find ways of dealing with common problems. Humans are brilliant at interacting. We’re planners and plan-communicators. Humans plan things together, and this is therefore how humans do co-operate when being constructive.
It’s in this frame of mind we enter a much more interesting place - we see therefore we are . The world is on show, presenting not only the awfulness of today but the world of the ‘bigger picture’. The only thing hidden today is hidden through a veil of tears. As we see better so we can contribute to the energy behind a much more interesting world than the one we have at the moment. Our job surely is to find the energy we need by contributing to the making of such energy - at first, that energy is physical energy drawn from a diet based on plants.
If we start wanting to contribute (rather than getting cosy with the exploiters) we can start to feel useful. Out of that wanting comes a self-assuredness. By no longer wanting me-things but wanting a softer sort of energy, we are wanting (just by going vegan) for something that we know instinctively is the best we can want for. And then, nothing else much counts.