The speaking conscience

While we can still speak out we should. While it is still legal to disparage animal foods, while there’s no risk of being thrown into jail for it, we should speak as widely and as wildly as we want to. It, and animal rights, is surely a sound enough basis for a valid, non-violence-based, protest movement.
But for the protesters, who are vegan, it is also a whole way of life. Trying to get our message across is often an uphill slog, but on a personal level, once our vegan lifestyle is securely established, it’s a downhill run. It’s a surprisingly attractive thing to be doing these days, and it’s that feature which should be worrying the authorities, including the animal industries. There would be a fear of society’s collapse if people no longer wanted to buy their stuff.
They’d probably attempt to push animal rights underground by making food denigration illegal. It would all be done gradually, but as they will inevitably try to limit our freedom of speech it will spice things up no end. It will bring focus to the one subject that doesn’t thrive under any sort of regime.
With this in mind we should appreciate our present freedom to speak up for animal rights, and shout about it as loudly as we can. Not to put people off but as a show of bravado and pizzaz – either way, if people get to listen it’s our strong beliefs they’ll admire, as well as the courage of our convictions. Our outrage is our strength but we need to be able to moderate it all with quietness. It’s okay to show off a bit, but we mustn’t pretend to have all the answers.
We know amongst ourselves that we do have a set of principle that represent some extremely valuable answers for life, but we aren’t so much preachers as observers, and we’ll remain that way as we keep trying to solve the mystery. It’s a question that niggles all of us. It concerns human psychology. We still don’t know why conscience pricks some people and not others.
So, as much as we need to speak out we also need to listen. We need to find out where other peoples’ head are at, thence how to reach them – it’s not just a case of delivering information, we need to discover what is blocking people’s conscience.