Awake!

Vegans are like the alarm clock which people resent, which wakes them out of sleep and makes them face up to the day. But a little later they may be glad to have been woken up. In the short term vegans have an unpopular job, jolting people into a new awareness, but we needn’t be more unpopular than necessary.
It’s not a straight forward job at the best of times, especially if we seem to smell sweet but still wear heavy boots. Pushy vegans are as out of date as old time preachers. Communicating animal rights today has to be a subtle process. How do we bring animal rights to people’s attention, bearing in mind we are waking them, even alarming them? How do we get them eating vegan food and thinking about animals, when they don’t want to? Not by finger wagging, that’s for sure. Nor by disapproval or making judgements about their values.
I suggest the principles we’re promoting should be coaxed along by the attraction of the foods themselves and by the attractiveness of our own personalities - then there is something for them to identify with. And that might need imagination on our part. For a start, we have to kill off the absurd notion that strictly disciplined vegans live on a diet of lettuce leaves. We need to show off how delicious vegan foods are and promote the attractiveness of a vegan lifestyle. That’s a job in itself and it hardly leaves us much time for nursing our own feelings of alienation.