Angry?

What is it vegans are really angry about? Is it about other people or about our selves? If it’s about our own ineffectiveness to persuade people to change, then somehow we must keep our sadness and outrage in check and channel our anger into something constructive, especially since only a small percentage of the brain is being used when we’re angry, and that may be why animal activists aren’t as effective as we’d like.
Anger should be used as a springboard to better understand the precise problem we have with our fellow humans. I suppose it’s the disappointment we feel, that people can have such double standards - if nice friendly farmers and kindly men and women can be so indifferent to what happens to animals. They seem to feel such a lack of protectiveness towards them, as if they are not quite ‘civilised’.
It may be that reluctantly we have to admit that the very people we live with are much weaker than we thought. They either don’t have the sensitivity or they haven’t thought through their actions properly. Either way it doesn’t bode well for the future, and it’s understandable that we get angry. And then what? Anger isn’t the most useful emotion to have, perhaps it’s a hedge against something worse. If it goes deeper, towards hopelessness, and we’re likely to get depressed we may not be capable of being useful to the animals. If our despair can be a driving force for us, that’s different. The we realise how so many people have let themselves be duped and that gets us nearer to the scale of the problem we face. If we can see how whole populations have been corrupted (by a need for animal foods) and have given over their power of choice to others, we’re getting closer to the heart of the problem. And if we can see that people are now immune to the truth of how things are we’ll better understand why they continue to spend their money on food and clothing of animal origin. Anger and despair if felt can be used to focus on this slippery problem where people are far more deeply involved in the animal trade that we think. It comes down to this, that by giving support to the suppliers people have given them permission to ‘stop at nothing’ and the wrongness of that brings us to the horror that is our society’s attitude to animal use. For vegans who don’t share this attitude it makes us angry but hopefully we aren’t consumed by it. Instead our anger should be turned into an even greater determination to see this whole thing through, despite the odds against us. We can be inspired by someone like Pythagoras, for what he did thousands of years ago, when he courageously made a stand against state sponsored violence to animals. And now, all this time on, when we haven’t got to risk our lives to speak our minds, we have perhaps more reason to speak up, since indifference and cruelty is worse and the silence surrounding it is more profound.