Why vegans go out on a limb

1374:y

Being vegan is like belonging to a family.  It’s my ‘group’.  It’s nice to belong and to be amongst people I can identify with.  It’s even nicer to feel special, since we all want to feel special.  We like being special to our family, to our circle of friends.  Most of all we’d like to be special to our whole town, and what we wouldn’t give to be famous in our own country?  The bigger the group that 'knows us and respects us’, the more special we feel.  Many people would willingly sell their soul for fame.  And all this is within the bounds of possibility, but only on condition we stay loyal to Society and its core values.

If the values of our society seem wrong and we have to move away from it, as vegans certainly do, then we can expect ostracism and people’s deliberate misunderstanding of us.  It’s the opposite of approval.  We end up feeling alienated, and since no one likes being excluded we all try to look as normal as possible.  No one wants to look like a freak.

         

Yet vegans accept all this downside and stand against almost the whole of their society, caring nothing for their own wants, other than being given the chance to explain why. 

As a society we all more or less dress the same, talk the same, behave the same, that is, until we come to something we can’t accept, which we must speak out against, even if we’re going to be harshly judged for it.  To vegans, that very judgement is the worst thing we have to put up with from our society.  It’s the unfairness of the judgement that makes many of us so angry, because some of our very sensible arguments are being wantonly ignored.  And they’re being ignored by people who are obviously capable of understanding them. 

Animal Rights advocates often feel like victims, and that’s bad enough, but there are dangers for us in this; we victims tend to show it.  It can looks ‘martyr-ey’.  It can seem like conceit, as if we are feeling superior to others.  In response to being made to feel like a victim, we are tempted to become victimisers ourselves, with our swag of arguments at hand.  We seem to be the types of people who want to be judging those who don’t agree with us.

         

The real reason behind Society’s harsh judgment of us is that we seem to be following principles which haven’t even been thought about by the average omnivore.  So, from our vegan point of view, it seems like a no-win game we play with our adversaries: it starts off reasonably enough, then, when dialogue changes to a vegan monologue, it all goes pear-shaped.  It’s hard to know where we should stop, especially when we’re getting no intelligent counter arguments.  It’s easy for us to go too far, and maybe blow our whole relationship with a person, by being too ‘over the top’ with what we say.  Sometimes if we spot an unreasonable disagreement, we become aggressive in order to make ourselves (and our good sense) heard.  And if the response to what we say seems frivolous, we might feel compelled to show how deeply we feel about Animal Rights issues.  And then it’s a fine line between being assertive and being aggressive.

To be outrageously noisy is one thing - making value judgements about people to their faces is another.  It’s usually counter productive.  Today, at a place I was working, a client said to me, “I see you’re a vegetarian” (he’d read the slogans on my bike, and thought it said something about animal eating) and I hit back with, “Yes, I don’t eat what you’re eating” (he was eating meat stew for lunch).  I thought about it afterwards.  That was a rude way of replying, even though I said it as ‘a laugh’.  Perhaps I was miffed, because he’d been cooking beef for his lunch and I couldn’t stand the smell, and couldn’t remove myself as I normally would.  He’d been innocently making himself some lunch, as he does everyday.

         

I looked back on it, when I got home in the evening.  I got to thinking “me different to him”.  Apart from his beef lunch and he being thirty years older than me, he was overall a much nicer person than me.  And that made me think!

         

As soon as there’s any disapproval in my mind, however convincing my argument, the message of it gets lost-in-delivery, in the sound my words make.  And I know that when the message doesn’t actually get across, I’m not being much help to the animals.

         

The big negative here, after any bun-fight, is that we get a reputation for being a bit aggressive.  That way we lose support all round.  And, after all, the losing of friends isn’t really the main aim here!  It isn’t for reasons of wanting to make war, that we go out on a limb in the first place.