Reconciliation

1661:

Playing the ‘blame game’ is popular with some vegans. The Animal Industry and consumers in general make for an easy target. So why not give them some curry? It helps to release our anger and frustration. It's good to get things off our chest. But, constructively speaking, there isn’t much to be gained from apportioning blame. What’s done is done and can’t be undone.

After the apartheid era in South Africa, there was a need to move on, towards reconciliation, in order to avoid a blood bath. It showed a deliberate moving away from the idea of revenge. It’s often revenge that lets us enjoy, for a moment, the misfortunes of those who aren’t like us and who deserve some sort of retribution. But at what cost?

This is where true compassion shows through. It’s hard to imagine how one can find any sort of reconciliation with the animal-eaters, because their version of 'species-apartheid' is so mean, cold and majority-protected.

Nevertheless, there’s a great need for vegans and non-vegans to make a point of contact, to be talking together about their differences – it’s the only way we’re ever going to deal with the very worst mistakes we’ve each already made – they turning on the animals, we turning on the animal-eaters.

We all need to turn into compassionate folk – it’s as simple as that. Firstly, it’s a personal thing, concerning our own food choices. But then it moves onto something broader, to the principle of living non-violently and being non-judgmental. And this brings all of us into feeling at peace with our detractors, not excusing what we each do but being on friendly terms whilst discussions are underway. Our first aim should be to restructure our interactions. Once we see each other making an attempt to accommodate the expectations of the other, we’ll automatically move past the accusing stage. When we can find ourselves discussing our points of difference without any fear, we no longer have to be unfriendly with each other. Then we’re really on the road to repair.

Once we can feel some movement, albeit small progress, we can start to experience a seed of optimism growing, perhaps for the first time. Ultimately, it’s in everyone’s interest to build a feeling of optimism. We can’t do that if we’re pessimistic or resentful of others. Vegans have certainly got to get over their judgement-based, looking-down-our-noses at those who aren’t vegan - yes, we have to realign our attitudes, for sure. But for people in general, there are hard times to come when being judged by future generations.

If we don’t do anything about animal slavery now, history will say we were an uncaring people. Future generations will accuse us, quite rightly, of being too casual about a potentially catastrophic problem. There will be no excuses, since the records will show that we knew everything we needed to know to make the necessary changes. Our need for radical attitude change shares the same early-warning as that of climate change.