Stepping out - Second step

1551: 

Vegans act at first out of raw outrage, then it moves towards being attracted to the lifestyle and the meaningfulness of vegan principle.  Vegans take something from an unfamiliar dimension (solely plant-based foods and clothing, etc) and install it, as a routine, into their own daily lives.  Our boycotting and examination of the details of ingredients in products is ridiculed and often causes friction with family and friends.  Tough!  But when the instinct is strong enough, when we believe something is so fundamentally wrong (about the way we've been brought up to do things, the way everyone else does things) there’s an overwhelming urge to act. 

         

As time goes by, as a vegan diet is installed, as animal advocacy strengthens, then non-violence itself shows the key to so many of our problems.  Yes, it's a simple enough answer; by applying the principle of avoiding gratuitous violence, it’s likely we’ll experience the law of just returns - in that, what goes around comes around.  What you give it out you get back.  Or, put another way, if you don’t play with devils, they can’t touch you.

 Non-vegans, who by their very eating habits alone, invite the ‘horribles’ into their lives, haven’t looked at non-violence as something significant enough to install.  Probably, like betting on the outsider, it doesn't seem worth the gamble. It's likely to cause inconvenience. It's not likely to be effective enough.  And some will say, “Life is too short to worry about such details.  Why be bothered with the sort of trivia vegans seem to worry about"?

So, the answer always comes back to the most convincing arguments, probably not about the poor penned up animals, probably not about the possibilities of heart attacks and chronic illness, but possibly about the future sustainability of the planet.  But there are those who don't care even about that.  They say, "I won't be around when the planet goes pear-shaped, so why not live now and pay later ... at some distant point in the future".  And at this point there's little point trying to talk sense into them.  To them, nothing horrible has happened to them - nothing has been transformed - no one principle seems capable of making a transformative change, so they stick with what they know.  But in doing so, they help to perpetuate the very violence which is killing the human spirit.   Their apathy is a key ingredient of the problems we all have to suffer for.

Vegan arguments emphasise the importance of not being cruel to weaker beings, not to be destructive of beautiful things and not to be wasteful of Earthly bounties.  If vegans are going to influence others, it's not enough for us simply to glow.  Not to show off as being ‘better-than’.  We have to argue our case hard and show by our own behaviour and our anti-bullying approach, that we have something important we want to say and are taking the trouble to do what it takes to be convincing.