Pushing home our ideas

Firstly we have to accept that in many ways we, as vegans, have become strangers in our own land. We’ve taken on a different culture linked with a different sensitivity. So we have to emphasise that we aren’t trying to draw attention to ourselves or show that we’re better than anyone else, we are just experimenters. We’re the ones working on the difficult initial transitional stages of a switch-over. We’re introducing a new idea to people, using life-saving ideas that will assist human development in the future. But however grand our plan, however optimistic, we can’t be standing on street corners shouting about it. We don’t need the crazy tag! We simply need to be low key providers of ideas to improve the quality of people’s lives, and thereby save animals. We are trying to persuade people to listen to us because there’s a link between our issues and all the other main issues facing humanity. These animal issues point very logically to the initial and very repairable problems our society has. Humans are on the brink of a realisation that the universe is powered by a sense of love that rests on a bed of non-violence. At this root point we have to decide how we go, so it’s not global warming or environmental protection or disease or diet we need to fix first, but the whole question of our attitude to harmlessness. If we can survive without gratuitous violence, the human race may sail on into a very bright future. With non-violence as our rule no. 1, we’ll be better able to tackle the other great problems facing us.
So, this is what vegans (or at least some of us) are trying to persuade others to seriously think about - the possibility of maintaining a productive society without the use of domination and animal enslavement and without fighting violence with more violence. We may see no other way of stopping the atrocities against animals but that’s the great challenge, to find subtler and more persuasive ways of reaching the passive consumer. We may feel compelled to use abuse to demonstrate how angry and determined we are. But whether we are shouting ‘meat is murder’ or ‘death to Israel’, it’s just another ugly violence. It’s in our voice and in our attitude; we show how we have given up on finding a non-violent solution to the human condition.