Not to be defensive

Well, it’s probably true to say that most vegans, including myself, would like to see the animal industries closed down immediately. It’s like having an Auschwitz in every town. Every main street in the country is awash with the corpses of executed animals. You’d think that anything anyone could do to clean up this mess would be work well done. However, the trickier side to all this is a that we are aware of the momentousness of our times. Decision time. We seem to have arrived at a turning point in human history, right here over animal rights no less. It isn’t just a global-scale physical collapse facing us but an ethical collapse of the same proportions. It’s haunting us to death. What humans are inflicting on animals is making us face our worst demons, namely the part we play personally, adding to the part we collectively play in causing pain and death. We’re aware of it, we’re afraid of it and yet we embrace it every day, when we’re shopping. In the shop we try to cauterise our feelings. We try to build mental walls to stop thinking about the issues, and hope like hell we don’t meet that vegan friend who never stops talking about animals.
For us, as vegans, when we’re talking to non-vegans, when we get ignored or ridiculed, it’s so unfair and … we’ve all been there … it’s such a stupid reaction. And yet it’s perfectly understandable. Constructively it’s grist to the mill for what we each will have to say soon. Vegans need to experience the rebuff, the tired joke at our expense, the blatant ignorance, etc. Vegans need to become ace communicators and learn to handle the reactive “never-trust-a-fucking-bean-eater” comments. Rather than entering into the argy-bargy, instead of taking the same old moral-high-ground approach, we could turn things around and regard these little injustices towards us as nothing. It’s all useful stuff for the communicator. The usual reactive responses we get aren’t really a threat to us, rather we should see them benignly, as a cries for help. Let’s face it, meat-eaters for many reasons, would like to be other than they are, and if only for weight reasons many of them would just love to explore the vegan diet.
There’s never any need for vegans to go on the defensive, especially when purposely provoked. When we do we create a ‘them and us’. Approach is tricky because our senses say combat is the right way to go, but on another level we know it isn’t. The ‘meat-is-murder’ campaign was designed to shock, using that most evocative word to act as a wake-up call. Now we need fresh slogans, to not appear frayed. The message is our creative patch; animal rights is the juice of our creativity. We don’t need tired, angry, lecturing (like these blogs I write!!!). We don’t need exortation. It bores people. It offends people and worst of all it suggests we haven’t got anything new to say.
The old accusatory image needs to be sloughed off. Hurling facts and figures into people’s faces is twentieth century speak, in the style of: ‘if you can’t persuade them bomb them’. We’ve got to be cosier than that!