632:
Vegans who promote Animal Rights need to understand the size
of our task. And the manner of it. Many people have already changed, quite
radically, over these past 50 years. But alongside, technology has advanced
dramatically, so that we now find ourselves living with a younger generation,
amongst the Children of the Information Age. If they are discriminating it’s
because they have access to more information with which they may
‘discriminate’. Ironically, there’s now too much information and we don’t know
what to take notice of; today it isn’t enough for us to simply pass on
information to others and expect to wow them with it, today there’s more
cynicism and suspicion. So, it comes to this - no one can take in all the new
information available, so they choose just the bits they want. We are
information-saturated. As communicators of ideas nothing is very
straightforward, especially if ‘the idea’ isn’t immediately appealing or if
it’s an inconvenient idea like veganism.
Today, bombarded, softened up by the
sheer volume of information being put out, ordinary people are thought to
become pliable (or so the vested business interests hope anyway). The Animal
Industries, who do so much advertising, aim to install beliefs into the minds
of their potential customers, and in doing so shut down individual thinking. They
succeed only when people begin to follow the crowd and do as they’re told. Once
people have settled into lifestyle food-habits they’re captive. These habits
are not much different to any chemical addiction, since most of the addiction
to animal products concerns the powerful taste-sensation of them.
The vegan’s
attempt to convince people that they’ve been duped isn’t easy, for why would people
believe us? Why would they trust what we say? There’s so much misinformation in
circulation today that anything too new, too radical or too inconvenient goes
into the too-hard basket of ‘unbelievability’.
In our attempt, we need something
special to break through all of that, something all-encompassing. It’s likely
that most people will see the vegan diet one-dimensionally; that it is simply good
for slimming. Or they’ll see it as good for other self-benefits. But veganism
is more than a diet for personal food-advantage. On a deeper level it suggests
a wholly different way of thinking.
Everything about being vegan, and
everything stemming from it, gets the brain cells moving faster. It lets us see
stunning potentials and transformations, and it addresses a lot of allied
issues too. Now if, for whatever reason, you’re drawn to it, if you’re
receptive to the reasoning behind it, then it’s likely you’re also hearing what
vegans are saying about animals and their ‘right to a life’. Whilst not
necessarily agreeing with us at first, the thinking-person might be ready to
consider giving our arguments a fair hearing. And that will lead to a better
understanding of non-violence and all the benefits of that accruing to our own
species, let alone other species.
But there will always be those
who are most decidedly NOT drawn to this. For them, everything about veganism
is either unclear, unbelievable or unattractive. As animal advocates we have
wear that. For us it’s probably the hardest part of all, juggling the
responsibility of explaining it with the trickiness of dealing with such heavy
initial reluctance.
How do we expose the
misinformation? How do we get people to believe we’re telling the truth? How do
we deal with our own unapproachability? Somehow we have to find our own way to
weave a path through this undergrowth, so that we can encourage greater
empathy, to get people to think first about the plight of exploited animals
before they consider their own convenience.
No comments:
Post a Comment