Doing Something About It

1921:

Perhaps, as consumers, we are not only brainwashed by misinformation but dazzled by the abundance of commodities in our shops. Steaks, rich dairy foods, soft woollen jumpers, cute cartons of pretty eggs, elegant leather jackets, plus many other affordable items, too numerous to mention. It’s all so attractive. It’s like living next to an Aladdin’s cave, which we can’t walk by without going in. We can’t pass up the chance to buy products, co-products and by-products of animal origin. We can afford to buy them and can’t afford to miss out on them, so we don’t look too closely at the fine detail. We let the horror story of animal cruelty go unremarked.

But what goes on in the privacy of the human mind, regarding the wrong of it all? We tell ourselves that we don’t want to see it. And if we do take notice, we might have to admit that “Something has to change, but let it not start with ‘me’. I’ll join you once you change. I don’t want to start the ball rolling”.

But ever since the advent of vegan-consciousness, the ball has been rolling. Rolling for some seventy years, and still not many have been seen to ‘join’.

An example: my ‘vehicle’ is lying in a ditch. It has broken down and obviously, it isn’t going to repair itself. It will lie there until I do something about it.

If something needs to be repaired in this world of ours, surely, I need to do what needs to be done. What you choose to do is none of my business. It’s a matter between me and my conscience. And I know that the less I take notice of my conscience, the weaker my central safety mechanism will be. Logically, I must come to a point where I’m no longer effectively in control, where I’ve left my car in the ditch, lost control of my own life and am at a standstill.

As I might mindlessly wander into a shop and spend my money on questionable products, so I might have done something I will regret later. If I keep on doing it there’ll come a time when I’m helpless to put any of it right again. Recently when the full impact of killing cattle was shown on one of our most popular TV current affairs investigation programmes, it didn’t require much of a leap of imagination to see how all eaters of beef are implicated. We were shown ugly scenes of how cattle were being killed. I heard a lot of talk about that programme, from meat-eaters, who were perhaps trying in vain to absolve themselves from what they were witnessing, and by now regretting. I wonder if, by now, they’ve forgotten what they saw.