Stepping out

In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Alice goes looking for something. She finds a bottle inviting her to drink. She follows the instruction, she takes the risk and steps into the unknown. She enters another world, and her first instinct is to make friends with the beings she meets there, but they don’t reciprocate because they accept their own dimension and can’t change (their superficial nature). They don’t see the point of befriending Alice or taking her advice. They see no way to improve their life by following her example, which may be a metaphor for human obstinacy towards taking notice of obvious answers.
In our world all the opportunities for change exist, changes for our own benefit and for other’s. So what prevents us stepping out from what we’re used to? What stops us following the “drink me” instructions and entering a radically new world to find a new slant on our problems? I guess we’re reluctant because the other dimension seems unrealistic, incomprehensible or even ridiculous. But for people like vegans, we are forced to take something from beyond the familiar dimension (in this case, step away from our familiar violent world) and then apply what we find there, to our whole life. To us there must be some obvious answers, we look beyond the present world which we know is fundamentally flawed. And we find a simple principle of non-violence which seems highly significant. But to non-vegans, who haven’t looked that far, it isn’t such a universal principle. It doesn’t appear significant enough to apply it universally. And there the great difference lies.
No one wants to waste time on trivial matters and veganism may seem utterly trivial in the greater scheme of things to non-vegans. So, vegans need to communicate why vegan principle is linked to the universality of non-violence, and therefore why it is so important. Although we know what we’ve found has transformed our own lives, for others nothing like that has happened to them, nothing has been transformed and there remains a belief that no one simple principle is capable of making transformatory changes.
Vegan arguments, logic and statistics can help to convince but we need to translate everything into a language that can be understood by anyone. We have to continually return to basics, to emphasise the importance of not being cruel to weak beings or destructive or wasteful. That anti-bullying, anti-exploitative principle, combined with the example of our own behaviour, is what we have to convince with.