Seeing violence for what it is

972: 

I suppose what fascinates me more than anything is why some people get it and some people don’t.  Of course, it’s easier for those who have seen it and acted (and, of course, have followed the logic far enough to go vegan) just as it is easier to understand how those who will not look (who aren’t vegan) can see so much less, are that much lazier or non-stimulated enough.

For vegans, the more we learn about the use of animals the more cruelty we see.  And that brings us to disapprove of the vast majority of people who won’t look.  Because we look and act on what we see, we get to see more than is comfortable.  More windows open up onto the dark world. But because we aren’t so deeply implicated in one sort of cruelty (towards animals) we can let ourselves see other cruelties, and then draw the connections between them.  For example, if people can allow animals to be violated for food it’s easier for them to be less concerned that children are dying needlessly for lack of food.  Perhaps that’s unfair, since many meat eaters do show great care and concern for starving kids, but in general if you can turn a blind eye to one sort of violence you’re better placed to be less outraged at war and pollution and greed, etc.  The more sensitive you become the more troubled you’ll be at the ugliness of our world, and want to do something about it.  The less sensitive you are the less troubled you’ll be by the hardness of ones fellow human beings.  So, what I’m trying to get at here is the need to become more sensitive to all of the violence, not just those ‘violences’ we can condemn from afar.  We can all comfortably hate war, hate environmental destruction, hate hunger because we are detached from it.  On the other hand we find it far harder to hate abattoirs if we still support them.