Not letting the side down

All of us are trained from childhood to make judgements of other people - if someone seems bad or stupid or weak our judging of them makes us feel better about ourselves. We like to feel superior. It’s a god-on-my-side safety net. But by being vegan we are also trying to win recognition of the principle of it. It should never be about me and my enlightened position but the abolition of enslavement and how that is so important. Therefore we shouldn’t be judging others, especially because we might damage the whole animal rights movement if we do (in the eyes of the public). If we think we have right on our side we may make ourselves unpopular. And why should that matter? But again, that’s not the point. As vegans we represent other vegans – it’s not our own reputation we might need to think about but the reputation and safety of all concerned. By judging those who aren’t like us, if that’s how we are perceived by others, it puts them off us. It turns them away from a particular way of thinking that they, anyhow, might have come round to in time.
Memory plays tricks on us if we think that because we are vegan now we were always so. Apart from a very few who’ve been vegan from birth we all came from another viewpoint and along the way we’ve changed. Is it possible that we might NOT have become vegan if we’d met up with a judgemental vegan? We might have found them too unattractive to be associated with.
Feeling safe as a vegan should cancel out any need to be judgemental. The violence in our society is a reaction to being thought of as inferior, so we mustn’t encourage that if we don’t want to add to the problem. Violence comes out of a wish to make others feel inferior. Why would we want to do that? We’ve been taught that a dose of violence keeps people in their place or it can drag people up to our level – we presume others need improving and that we don’t? And all this is based on judgement, aggression and a disregard for the non-violent principle.