1453:
When I decided to do
something, to protest, to speak out, to become vegan, the first thing I noticed
was that my own self esteem received a boost, and that felt good. But then I made a mistake. I thought others would notice what I'd done and
want to follow suit. But no, it ain’t
necessarily so. Just becoming vegan is
all I was going to be able to do, at first, while waiting for the penny to drop
with others.
You can’t just go up to
people and suggest they change. There’s
nothing simple about shifting a well established mind-set. All I could do was wait, and let them come to
their senses in their own time. But
who's got the patience, especially knowing that all those beautiful animals are
being slaughtered to feed the mindless rush for meat and all the other
animal-based stuff. Nah, I couldn't
resist, just as other vegans can’t resist, urging people to wake up. It was a fruitless urging, as it turns out.
But it interests me that
people insist so determinedly to stay asleep over animal issues. Probably for safety reason? When any of us first contemplated a vegan
lifestyle we probably considered all the obstacles first - and until these were
cleared up we weren't going to be persuaded to take such a radical step as
'going vegan'. In my own case, I kept
asking myself if it was safe? I eventually decided that it seemed to be safe
enough.
That’s how most practising
vegans start out. They read, they talk,
they question and conclude that the risk is worth taking. In 1943, when all this started, it rested on a
belief that one could physically survive on plants. It sounded bizarre and dangerous at the time,
but in hindsight we can see things more clearly. We’ve made great advances in understanding
nutrition, and we’ve been given lots of food choices which people didn’t have then.
Now the question we ask is what food and
clothing can NOT be manufactured from plants? Certainly egg white is valuable to the chef
just as leather protects our feet in the rain but apart from that, what are the
advantages of animal products? And are
these advantages worth torturing and killing millions of innocent animals?
The reason why vegan thinking
and vegan eating and vegan clothing is so important is that vegans are showing
others that physical survival is possible without recourse to animal
exploitation. Those of us on vegan
diets, for instance, have found remarkable improvements in health and well
being. And the effect on the mind, the brain,
the conscience and the soul are more than remarkable, if unprovable.
At first though, my
experiments were glitch-ed. My body and
mind needed time to readjust and, on a social level, relationships needed time
to acclimatise. I had to work on various
levels simultaneously, until things were running smoothly. Vegan diets are not a complete panacea. Food, however good it is, won’t necessarily
bring us any closer to becoming a more loving person or to 'non-separating'
from others. But, for me, it did install
the principle of non-violence into my thinking. By avoiding all that nasty animal food, I was
also avoiding the nastier side of my nature coming out, and allowing me to
think of myself as non-complicit with daily acts of animal cruelty.
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