Lamb – part two

My friend’s daughter started to talk about the food she’d ordered from the restaurant menu, to stir me up. I think she was meaning to make it into a joke, at this precise moment, but this sort of joke, like most jokes, is at someone else’s expense. I suppose it was aimed at me, at how foolish I am to take these things so seriously. For her it’s almost mandatory that a joke is made, to counteract my stand on Animal Rights. For her perhaps it’s important that whenever ‘animal-eating’ comes up in a conversation, it needs to be joked about. It shows people like me how unattractive and un-cool it is, to get sniffy about cuisine.
As the joke goes along it gains momentum, volley by volley. Hers is the first comment, mine comes next and it goes on until someone “wins”. “The lamb” is pitched as a joke but really it’s a challenge, a jibe, a quick in-and-out. To any long-time vegan, this sort of sniper attack is tediously familiar, but strangely, predictably, we vegans always rise to the bait. Meat eaters probably enjoy the outrage on our faces and even enjoy watching us trying to take control of our reply.
This sort of joke is a winner because meat eaters can be sure that a vegan’s sniffiness (about animals-being-eaten) will be aroused just by mentioning “the lamb”. It could be any animal of course, but we use the same word –lamb - for the animal as well as the cut of meat, so this word (this animal) is sure to trigger reactions. By admitting to eating a young sheep, a meat eater will certainly provoke outrage in a vegan.

Lamb – part one

Recently I was visiting an elderly friend of mine and her youngest and eldest daughters were visiting at the same time. The younger one ‘needed’ to joke with me about her choice of food at her sister’s birthday dinner in a restaurant. She let everyone know (particularly me), that she had had “the lamb”. This was her way of saying “up yours” to me, a reminder of how much her views differ from mine.
I’ve known her since she was a child and have followed her views for over 30 years. From the beginning she was sensitive to animals and familiar with vegetarianism. In later years she became interested in cuisine and now she’s making a stand for eating meat, hence her mischievous joke about “having the lamb”. Knowing me and knowing my stand, was she meaning to be unfriendly? She was obviously making a point about the eating of animals. Her having the lamb was a throw-away line but meant to attract attention. It rather changed the mood of our little tea party. Whatever could I say in reply that wouldn’t land us in hot water? I’m always up for discussing these things but I don’t quarrel to win my point. Some like a good slanging match. Maybe she wanted one. I don’t know her well enough, these days, to be sure of her affection. She’s intelligent and sensitive and doesn’t like letting things go.
As vegans, we’re not only up against lazy no-brainers, but also bright people who put up opposition. By deliberately provoking me, by rubbing it in about having “the lamb”, she knew it would get under my skin. Here I was having a cup of tea with my friend and suddenly ‘BANG’, out of nowhere things turn “heavy”. (My elderly friend, incidentally, was unaware of this conversation as she has a profound hearing disability). The three of us talked about the birthday dinner, the restaurant and the enjoyable evening had by all, then we get onto what each person ate … and then we came to “the lamb”.

The animal issue

Sunday 28th March 2010

There’s a gulf between people over the subject of animals - not the cute, cuddly ones, the “edible” ones. Until a couple of decades ago it didn’t get a mention, but then it all came out - how animals were being treated on farms and what was going on in abattoirs.
In the early eighties The Animals Film and the book Animal Liberation shocked people. We realised for the first time how much of our food relies on animals and what actually happens to the animals themselves. Slowly this information seeped into public consciousness, then, surprisingly, it came to a standstill. At least it did in Australia. Why? It has been a matter for some discussion on vegan websites and magazines but nowhere else. In the general community there’s a reluctance to face up to animal issues - probably because we feel too guilty to think about it. In private, if there’s any talk of it at all, it’s argued without much intellectual rigour. We like our animal food too much to want to put it down. We’re addicted to it. The matter of eating animals is just usually the butt of jokes.

Debtlessness

Debt mentality gave us a false impression of being richer than we were and like any bubble it had to burst. That realisation dawned on us slowly at first, then we caught up with reality, then it gathered speed as we took more and more for granted and acquired it ‘gratis’. Now, with less clean air, less fresh water, less bird song in the morning we’re learning the big lesson about debt – tat it is benign at first but toxic later. It’s a bit like animal food itself or anything else we’re not entitled to. By recognising that a new era is beginning a start can be made to repair

Starting to pay back

Once, when we were younger, when the world was less damaged, abundance seemed to be everlasting. Oceans were clean and teemed with fish. It was incomprehensible that whole river systems could ever die. Land was fertile. Our surroundings were attractive. It was unimaginable that the world could be turned into a slum. But over a relatively short period of time, with each person saving their own skin, we’ve nothing left in the kitty. The damage is done and we haven’t been able to stop taking. Instead we’ve refined cruelty and increased slavery, wrecked forests, polluted the air and generally become addicted to an increasingly unsustainable lifestyle. Now we’re in all sorts of trouble. From a state of plenty we’ve built up a debt burden. Our collective debts won’t easily be paid back. But try we must - it isn’t impossible, surely?

Inherited debt

Debts affect the generation which follows. Young people wake up to the horrors left them by their elders. They have no trouble putting two and two together to see what and why it has happened. They are familiar with self interest. They understand how forests come to be destroyed. They see how animals come to be factory farmed. They realise why poor nations are made to starve. We older ones are to blame for the destruction and cruelty and waste. The young get angry when they think about what they’ve inherited. But to be completely constructive about the mess we’ve left them we need to look at human nature. What is it? And has it changed much at all over the centuries?
Unless we want the next generation to do exactly what we’ve done we must stop adding to the collective debt. Unless we want today’s kids to spoil their own health, ethics and environment we can’t afford to sit passively by and do nothing. If we do, they will continue taking as we did, until there is nothing left to take.

Debt

Wednesday 24th March

The example set by young people especially who are ‘going vegan’ is noticeable to omnivores. Their noticing is the first step to thinking about one’s own habits, one’s own contribution to the ‘collective debt’.
Veganism is just one idea that rights the wrongness of stealing from others. The colonial powers stole from poorer nations to enrich themselves. Humans in general steal from animals for much the same reasons. Our thefts comes back to haunt us. Once-powerless countries become dangerous to the economies of the old colonial countries. Once-powerless animals that are used as food now become dangerous to human health. There are harsh consequences to stealing, outcomes of running up debts.

Greater good is self-benefit too

The criticism of both young and older people, for their indulgent lifestyle, seems partially true and partially misplaced. Older people react by arguing that the trouble with the world today is the young, who in turn argue that the trouble today is with the older people for causing major world problems … and so, whoever we are, we pass the buck.
For me as a cyclist I blame the car driver, for me as a wage slave I blame the rich, and so on. But really it’s a whole complex of issues that rise to the surface and make us cranky. We feel impotent because we are part of the group and the collective seems so fixed. We drive cars and we fly in planes that pollute our world. What can any individual do to stop it apart from not driving or flying? In today’s world how can we NOT take part without disadvantaging ourselves? I know if I tighten my belt and act responsibly I’ll feel resentment that others aren’t doing likewise.
Perhaps the one way each of us can get started, paying back, acting constructively and avoiding resentment is by looking at the one way in which we can make a stand without making a rod for our own back; doing something for the greater good which also happens to benefit ourselves.
Which brings us to saving the environment, our health, the animals, the economy and most importantly saving our own sense of meaningfulness, by going vegan. By not exploiting animals, by eating plant-based foods and by wearing non-animal clothing and shoes, we do something to make us and our world feel better. It helps pay back the debt we’ve collectively run up. By boycotting very many of the products on the market that are unethical it is one way we can affect the collective habit. And that might appeal to young people who don’t see how they can be otherwise constructive with their own lives. They almost certainly want to build a future and not have to adopt the ruined pleasure dome handed down by their elders.
By going vegan young people can show, by this one major gesture, how individual action can start the ball rolling.

You just can’t win!

If vanity is the big trap in life, you’d think after some decades of life we’d learn about it and stop ‘doing’ it. All I’m saying here is that, for older people who could be setting an example for the young, if they want to avoid neuroses (concerning lost youth and missed opportunities) they need to stop running up their vanity ‘debts’. We should get used to paying-back as we go along, doing without, a little self-effacement, a touch of responsibility-taking. If we don’t, then we risk not being able to restore balance later in life and of course …then it all ends in tears.
We might start out in life with a sense of abundance. When we’re young we mightn’t need to be too sensible about things; we seem to be able to enjoy effortless sensory experiences. We’re lulled into a false sense of security. And then, as we get older and past our prime, we want to recapture some of the pleasures of past years. But now pleasure requires more investment. We lose our capacity for pursuing it. Then our health goes and then our strength. We don’t spontaneously run just for fun. Our body creaks more and now we can’t even run for a bus! If you speak with very old people they’ll say how important it is to ‘keep your health’, because once lost it’s very hard to get it back. For them, so they say, there’s pain every day. Whereas younger people don’t get much body pain and it isn’t so ominous when they do - health isn’t an issue because they haven’t lost it yet. But they do know that good health and good looks go together, and energy, sexuality and a slim, athletic body also go together, and this pulls them into line, somewhat. But up against this there’s a powerful need to excite the taste buds and satisfy food cravings. So here, at this battle site, we’re torn between pleasure and good sense. It’s so all-consuming that we forget the rest of the world going on about us, and about the need to pursue ‘the greater good’. And then we are criticised for living an indulgent lifestyle.
Huh! You just can’t win. But it was never just about winning anyway.

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity

(Ogden Nash follows that on with “ …that’s any fun at all for humanity”.)
All humans, young and old, are vain. We want to have fun with our friends and we want to look good in their eyes. We’re more likely to go for attractive shoes than consider whether the leather they’re made of is okay for them to be made from. We’ll maybe eat non-animal foods for health reasons but not rule out wearing shoes (made with the skins of animals) because this won’t adversely affect our health. And even with health itself we may consider eating junk food because, especially when we’re young, health isn’t an issue … that is until we start to lose control of our body weight … and even then we only tinker with foods that fatten us. That’s a long way from establishing good health practices. Whether young or old, we try to squeeze what we can from life. We spend big, risk debt, ignore warnings and mainly consider our own interests. We want to live for the moment. Above all we try not to become like those sad people (usually older people) who ‘don’t seem to have ‘any fun at all’.
A young person’s instinct will be to paint life in with a few brush strokes taken from a brightly coloured palette. To them it looks convincing. It seems instinctive. It doesn’t have to be thought about too deeply in case we inadvertently undermine our self confidence. At a certain age youngsters, who’ve been repressed throughout childhood, are suddenly free to experience every possible stimulating experience. And why not? We only live once. Live life while you can …until the shutters come down and we are forced to change (usually in later years). We’ve become the victims of our own vanity and conceit.

Indulge

Materialism is rampant. Our thirst for the material satisfactions of life is insatiable. To get the things we want we take trees out of forests, put people in slums and factories and enslave animals. The rich have made fortunes out of it and become powerful through their wealth. Wherever there’s been benefit to them they’ve taken without restraint.
Over all other species, we humans are dominant enough to do as we please. Apart from a few viruses nothing can stop us …. anything standing in our way is got rid of. If any human population falls out of line we bomb it, if a useful animal like a kangaroo can’t be farmed we hunt it, if a rabbit is a pest and it can’t be controlled we spread a disease to do the job for us. We do what we do without a second thought. And we pass the violence on, from generation to generation. We demand material satisfaction wherever we can find it.
Initially this appeals to young people who don’t know any different. Their mantra: “Live NOW!”. They want to have a carefree approach to things, and they seem to get away with it because their ‘significant adults’ are generally enchanted by their exuberance. Older people find young people’s vitality and spontaneity exciting and hardly dare to notice any lack of responsibility or lack of independent thinking. Conversely, young people don’t usually find their elders exciting at all, and turn to their peers for support, which exposes them to peer pressure, group thinking and a lot of unthought-out behaviour. Thus we are as we are and will continue to be …. unless we suggest an alternative that makes enough sense to reverse the indulgent trends of today.

Eliminating our debts

We are in debt, everyone of us. We may think we owe nothing but money, but we are part of a culture that lives now and pays later, believing that the debt will never have to be paid. We don’t care about causing damage or wasting what we don’t need. There seems to be so much for the taking. We believe there’s nothing to pay back because it’s all free, the air, the water, the soil, the flora and fauna, and we can throw away what we don’t use. Same with minerals from the earth, they’re plentiful and cheap. We either live high on the hog or we aspire to it. It’s a human-centred, narcissistic attitude we have. Each generation takes it a little further so we hardly notice things getting so out of hand. We aren’t passing down to younger ones a sense of responsibility and frugality. Instead we’re bypassing our innate checks and balances to pursue every opportunity for pleasure that emerges.
Probably our biggest ‘opportunity’, we reckon, is to be found by exploiting animals. There are rich pickings here despite the need for much cruelty to get the full benefit. We lay to waste on a grand scale, and it’s here we see what true cowards we are … the defenceless animals are massacred (at a rate of 1500 deaths per second), and we do it because we can, because they can’t fight back. If you become vegan you at least eliminate this debt.

Go VEGAN

In the worst scenario, the human host loses its power to fight back, cellular susceptibility increases and damage is done, whether ethical or chemical. But we don’t have to do ourselves damage. We don’t have to participate. We don’t have to take responsibility for the ringing of cash registers. But we do need to take responsibility for just about everything else.
Both our emotional and physical immune systems are usually very nicely safeguarding us. Our spiritual and mental immune systems are usually beautifully honed to perfection. These systems don’t need to be compromised or weakened. But then they also don’t need to be strengthened since they’re probably just fine as they are. We are working machines that don’t need to be torn apart by cravings or a guilty conscience or nutritional imbalance. A vegan diet, a vegan ethic, a respect for the vital life force is all we need. To be swayed away from these natural balances is just plain stupid, especially when we in the West have access to all the information we need and food we need to live a vegan lifestyle. It keeps harm to the minimum and benefits all concerned.

Pay back

If we go downstairs from the music-filled attic to the flautist’s basement we might find a fridge and in it part of a baby sheep’s body. Our musician calls it ‘chops’ (most suitable for describing the violence needed to get them from the animal’s rib cage to the fridge shelf!). Now if these animal ‘remains’ have any power over us it’s in the perversion of the original animal’s life force – it’s soft tissue, ingested by the flautist, affects the musician’s system by perhaps compromising something VITAL. The ‘chop’ seemingly gives benefit but ends up acting like a leaden boot, which is the last thing our flautist needs to inspire beautiful music.
For our dearly beloved meat eaters, their cells filled with all this corrupted life force, their body and mind is held back. Their once-healthy brain signals are cramped by this heavy food. Our various immune systems have no defence against a lifetime of ingesting it. Advantage taking doesn’t pay off in the long run.
The cycle continues. We indulge, we give in to impulses, we let the ‘persuaders’ do their business with us and life goes on as usual. We can hear the sound of cash registers ringing and it’s pay back time in different ways for different players.

The great delusion

Tuesday 16th March

Objects may not be living and breathing beings like us but perhaps their purpose is to reflect what a being IS; it’s as if they ‘respond’ to our feelings for them, as if they ‘read’ our feelings? Maybe this is twaddle, but you must admit that somehow objects do respond to our attitude to them; probably the planet is changing its climate in response to our profligate use of fossil fuels. More constructively, a flautist possesses a flute and the flute takes on the status of ‘a treasured possession’ and the flute becomes a living being almost. It takes on a symbiotic relationship with its player. Whatever we call it, there’s something very nice here. Isn’t it everyone’s dream to lose themselves in a relationship, to love something or someone, in a symbiotic pact of intimacy? In his attic the flautist reaches for the flute, it being the inspiration for making fine music.
But all this symbiosis and closeness isn’t necessarily the complete answer to life. For that we need more than one flute, we need many flutes; we need to ‘symbios-ise’ with several elements in our life. We need to address perhaps a vast array of dysfunctional, inherited attitudes (which are far from producing any mutual benefits). The most damaging of these is the way we use animals. Here’s a classic example of delusion, a belief in the safety of having a ‘non-relationship’. It always ends in tears.
Our contact with certain animals, our cruelty towards them, is of mutual disadvantage. It starts out badly and ends up badly. Humans and animals – we’re deluded enough to think we’ve discovered a bargain, where it’s all advantage on our side with no chance of any disadvantage. Later, too late usually, we find things don’t work out quite as we thought they would. Here we have a lop sided situation, the too strong against the too weak, the destabilising element that is made so by the determination of human intellect hungry for advantage. In this case of humans using and abusing animals we have the ultimately ugly act of enslaving, killing and consuming with a disadvantage which creeps up slowly and strikes us down when we’re not looking. It comes in two forms, shame and illness, and which does the striking-down is unimportant - vegans suggest avoiding the whole messy involvement with non-relationships. That’s a conceptual framework we just don’t need any longer. Why try getting away with adding to so much imbalance when you don’t have to?

Un-discovering is impossible

Monday 15th March

Those humans who are close to other people do well. Those of us close to animals, we do well too not because we are being ‘good’ but because we like to be close to where there’s most energy. Energy and the possibility of close interaction is the attraction.
Closeness generates the energy to improve our lot. Our lot is of extra special interest to everyone of us. Everyone has ambitions, humans for a whole set of particular ambitions. We accumulate qualifications and possessions, and for the accomplished, life can seem just great. But then we see the ugly side of it. We may take possession of things and that makes us greedy for more. We take possession of information which at first seems advantageous but later can become heavier than chains. Some particular items of information we’d rather not even know about – we wish we’d never expressed a desire to know … but too late. Humans can discover complexity, and they say complexity is the greatest attraction for humans and yet we can’t “undiscover” it. We can’t return to the simple life nor can we unmake the atom bomb. Likewise, once we know what happens down on the farm, we are for ever haunted by that information. All we can do is act appropriately, ban the bomb with laws, ban the animal slavery by law, acknowledge and even help the less fortunate. We can’t any longer pretend that we didn’t notice!

Attachment and detachment

What does it feel like when we’re deciding who or what to respect, deciding when to trash things, deciding when something’s no longer useful? From love and attraction we move through to no-longer-wanting and no-longer-loving, like the things we have or the companion animals we have or one another we have. And sometimes we consider abandoning them. But whether it’s junk, friends, memories or houses, they each have power. They can each benefit us and they can each bring us down.
In order to stabilise our relationships we only need to drop all semblance of a disrespectful attitude. Between one another (or at least between us and animate beings like dogs and cats) disrespect is less likely to appear. We prefer to be near them, to be close and happy around them. We value their loyalty, affection and caring qualities, and isn’t that why we are caring and affectionate towards them? But with the less dear or less near we don’t always act so honourably. That homeless man we ignored or that animal we ate, that’s where we’re sorely tested. We say: “How can they possibly hurt me if I hurt them? They have no power or hold over me”. We show respect to our companion animals, to our family, but less to a stranger and even less to the animal we (de facto) kill. We show even less respect to the inanimate.
The shift that is taking place now seems to be moving away from dominance and power and force to a subtler, gentler intercourse between ourselves and our world. By showing kindness, compassion, acting altruistically we won’t earn any haloes but we might discover the slender route through to a whole new way of going about our business. It’s the shift of a ‘conceptual framework’, consistent within itself and only open to revision when evidence dictates. The closer we get ‘into’ it the wider the world of possibilities opens.

The unloveable objects we own

Once upon a time every thing was valued and was potentially useful for something. It was a much more closely connected society, perhaps because people regarded what they possessed like a personal relationship. They only had a few possessions so they ‘knew’ them better; it was more realistic to consider them and use them wisely than it would be today, where we possess so much ‘stuff’.
In the past we believed things were worth having, worth using, worth repairing and worth sometimes talking to. Through them we let our imagination flow. We let them become alive so that they became our responsibility; each item requiring its ‘owner’ to invest some concern for them.
Humans, by using money to acquire ‘stuff’, do take on the role of guardian, if only by providing each item with housing. Say with a car, we garage it and maintain it and in return it serves us well. It’s as if each ‘thing’, in its own way, puts us to the test, as guardians. In this way objects might arguably have a will of their own, winning us over, becoming indispensible to us, and often in the end becoming a burden to us too.

Love

Love is one of those words (like ‘guardian’ from yesterday’s blog) which could easily be misunderstood. It’s over used today. It can have enough sickly, sweet overtones to prevent most of us from mentioning the word. But love isn’t quite everything anyway, surely? Life isn’t just a matter of showering love on everything we see. In our waking days we most of us have to be involved with the material world. We have to attend to needs like clothing, washing, looking after our gadgets and machines, etc. Love is a big emotion but it can involve the mundane too. Take the fridge; it does a lot for us and deserves to be loved. It keeps our food cool and our beer cold. The fridge and the computer and the car, they each deserve high regard. Our high-ideal lifestyles often show disrespect for things, and if we think of animals as mere ‘things’ that same attitude of disrespect is applied to them, especially when they’re a chief source of food. We’re good at ‘loving’ but not always consistent with it. It’s often completely absent in our attitude concerning cruelty to animals. Somehow we think it’s normal and therefore okay.

The janitor

Janitors are what most of us, in our heart of hearts, are. We are guardian types.
I know the word ‘guardian’ can have creepy connotations. We’ve all read science fiction: the evil guardian, the uber-nanny, ultimate controller type. But, putting all that sci-fi stuff aside, surely humans are a guardian species? It’s our role to guard and protect. That’s what we do best and where, presumably, we get our best kicks!
In fact our brains have developed (hard-wired) to focus on our thoughts and feelings, then interpret them, then have fun at being empathetic. Because we can read what others most need, whether they’re people, animals or objects, we can devise ways of lessening their suffering or making things work better for them. Whether it’s car maintenance or relating to foreign species or in the field of human relationship, this is what humans can be so good at doing? Caretakers make things run smoothly.
If we think we might have the janitor gene in us it’s likely we’ll want to develop that skill. Empathising is good for all concerned.

The extra dimension

If “vegan” means more to us than just food then it might be a new basis for our thinking. If we can ever see ourselves as guardians, protective, independence-encouraging and with no unnecessary over-dependencies, then we can approach the ideal. This is no more or less than looking about us to see what needs of our attention. We become a sort of patron saint of lost causes. We are on the side of the most vulnerable, the ones who no one else thinks about. Rewards include no praise heaped on us, no encouragement, no notice taken of what we do. But if approval doesn’t matter much to us then we might just make it, to become one of the planet’s natural caretakers.

Coming home

On a return trip home (wherever that is) we experience nostalgia for ‘dominating’, tempered by the belief that fun is bad. As of course so much of it IS bad because it’s based on things we do which cause damage. But not all fun is bad. Take for instance the ‘sheer enjoyment factor’, then imagine it without the exploitative element in it. Imagine us using resources sustain ably and sensitively?
It’s always the same when you come home from a holiday; our big ideas fade fast and we go back to what we were. We might have come home from a long interplanetary journey or just come back from work at the end of the day. We do things, take initiatives, cook dinner, habits take over.
Is it possible for our evening to be free of any element of damage, or any damage to be kept consciously to the absolute minimum? The goal here is surely to satisfy our need for sheer enjoyment whilst adopting a no-damage policy towards things, animals, people and even ideas.

The sirens - part two

Each of the three planets we travel between is governed by the fourth planet on which greater good is dominant. This magnificent planet is just a bit far out for most travellers. We don’t visit it very often. Nor do we need to if we can control our urges a bit better than we do at present.
This planet is the natural overseer of the other three, and yet, like a true parent, it allows its children-planets to come to terms with their own individual natures, in their own time. But where does that leave us humans?
We’re for ever travelling between false destinations, between these three siren-planets, between competing temptations, never released from going around and around in a circle. We always carry the heavy burden of The Big Problem.
The glimpses we get into solving it seem to involve stepping aside from all the goods and bads of the world of morality (breaking the hold of Planet M) so that we can slip past these worlds, and get to No 4, with all its transcendental, changed-dimensioned thinking.
The magnetic pull of right and wrong drags our spaceship back. So instead we’re being drawn away from the sheer enjoyment factor of Planet Four. We forget the connection between the greater good and sheer enjoyment.

Sirens – part one (of two)

Would you like to come on a short journey, up? Up in the heavens, between four imaginary planets, each one representing different dimensions of human experience; as if we’ve at some time been familiar with travelling between the four planets mentioned below, and we are acquainted with each one.
On this quick interplanetary journey we’ll zing past two planets and start heading for the next one (up the track). We leave behind Planet E, Earth (the human dominated planet), past Planet O (where objects dominate) to the third planet, Planet M (where moral ideas dominate). These three planets we know well. Each one is attractive, each one lures us like sirens.
We’ve all travelled between these three planets, and hold nostalgia for each one. Take this last one – the morality planet – where we’ve learnt our moral imperatives. The main damage done by this planet is to confuse our role as guardians. And that damage has interfered dramatically with our relation to the other two planets.
Humans like looking after things, they’re good at it, and in many ways they do it brilliantly. So this is not something humans have a lot of trouble with. Except that this skill has been warped by the sirens on Planet M. These sirens seduce us into doublethinking and certain types of addiction which prevent us from clear thinking. On Planet M we learn practical things - how to survive, how to enjoy life morally … even when it’s obviously NOT moral. The doublethink of Planet M exerts a force on us and we have to grapple with it. We might feel attached to it, get nostalgic for it (when we’re elsewhere), and as we grow older we come to overlook its inconsistency and the nonsense of its doublethink.
When visiting the other planets we impose our damaged logic on innocent inhabitants. Objects, animals, environment all suffer from what we do. The way we behave fractures the fundamental laws of Nature. The damage humans do, especially when enslaving animals, contravenes such primary laws that it takes the very oxygen out of the atmosphere, making it almost impossible to breathe. That makes all the other damage we do seem relatively insignificant, but in total it all adds up to The Big Problem of Humanity.
To solve it we have to look behind it. (To be continued …)

A conversation

Each fact about animals, upon which vegan principle is based, can be a bomb shell. Guaranteed to start a fire and ignite a scene. Why? Because that fact which a vegan might point out probes attitudes too deeply for comfort. People are afraid of getting tangled up in awkward situations, and veganism IS an awkward situation.
Each proffered fact (often uninvited or unwanted) suggests a polite response. Usually in the form of a question. Usually it’s impossible to continue a conversation if it gets too ominous, as if being lured into a conversation-trap, where we’re either going to end up looking like a fool or a complete bastard.
So, here are the obvious two questions.
· Are humans more entitled to be free than animals?
· Are animals (including human animals) more entitled to consideration than inanimate objects?

We could study that (fascinatingly) all evening but what I’m emphasising is what is happening in a conversation between you and me. Facts are one thing, your feelings about me talking to you about Animal Rights is another.

Double standards

All of us, vegan and non-vegan, know we are caring beings and to prove it we take up the cudgels and stand up for what we feel passionate about. We speak out about something we believe in and then, down the track, we find we’re spending too much time on it. We try to spread ourselves too thinly and succeed in pleasing nobody, least of all ourselves, so we decide to prioritise. Some of the most important major issues have to be put on the “back-burner”. We choose the stuff not to care about alongside things we’ll be most caring about. Then we are haunted by the stuff we already abuse and the things we’ve forgotten about or can’t be bothered with … and what happens? Guilt cancels out all our best ‘brownie points’ … (the ones we’ve earned from showering so much tenderness on our loved ones, etc.) Our guilt over a few inconsistencies has the power to spoil the whole barrel of apples. One small double standard undermines an otherwise finely progressing life.
An example of inconsistency is in my own disregard for people who are poor. Take your regular ‘homeless man’ on the streets at night. I see him and I ask myself should I care about him? But I don’t want to take on another ‘responsibility’, so I pretend not to notice him.
In the same way, we pretend not to notice what we know we have noticed. Like the animals behind the food we’re eating. People know that chickens and pigs are just like dogs and cats, yet we regard one as unlovable and the other as loveable. Here’s a small absurdity which should have been dropped long ago. But it hasn’t been. Collectively, the human race has NOT made an agreement with itself that from now on we’ll regard all sensitive and sentient creatures as of equal importance.

Friday 5th March

Vegan principle
By not being consistent with what is and isn’t important we fog up the situation for ourselves … of course! But life isn’t just about clarity. It’s about improvements being made by way of testing ideals, to see if they work, to see if we should follow them.
Now, to be fair, ideals can fog things up too, so we end up being caught between utter absurdity and unrealistic perfections. It seems logical that the starting line lies in the middle, with something simple and achievable. The practical, common sense, down-to-earth way of going about most things has to be clear and completely efficient. It’s best if there’s one a simple revolutionary principle that we can constantly prod and poke and question, and yet remains un-phased. Most vegans would suggest food is the start of such a revolution.
This all sounds a bit seditious to the meat-eater. It makes them feel nervous about us but on reflection it must, even to them, seem logical. But oh! How uncomfortable it must seem (according to current perception, current beliefs, creeds, etc). I quote a 93 year old friend named Mary who says she admires our vegan principles, but the idea of having our diet is a “hideous thought”. She means the food of course. So for vegans promoting veganism, we do spark those sort of thoughts. People imagine what it could be like. Now, younger people are more familiar with new food regimes but the thought might be just as hiddeous. They don’t like ‘it’ mainly because deep down they know all the stories they hear about farm animals is likely to be true. They don’t want further information to confirm what they may be able to forget.

The weight of double standards

A Comprehensive Attitude Change towards our guardian role probably involves a long to-do list. Today’s big dis-ease is the feeling of being perpetually overwhelmed by that very list. In our attempt to shorten it we’re forced to compare close interests with more distant interests. We become pragmatists. We try to ration-out the care we have. We become partial and therefore inconsistent. For their part, vegans are examining their own consistency levels by living out their vegan principles; our to-do list is therefore longer and potentially even MORE overwhelming, yet I don’t think we’re drained of our energy because of that.
I reckon our biggest horror in life is the double standard that we’re applying all over the place. When we lift that off our shoulders we’re free. And then we’re no longer facing the problem of sorting out what to care about and what NOT to. For vegans we’re no longer facing the Problem of Solomon so we don’t get so frustrated at falling short of our ideals, if only because we’re not all the time dabbling in double standards.

At ease with change

This may sound like a long journey for any one of us, let alone a whole species of us. But if everyone became fellow travellers, just imagine! In reality, however, it comes down to just one of us merely starting. If we START by making baby steps, or what the Japanese call ‘kaizen’, then at least we’re on the move.
To get there. To reach ‘it’. Surely it’s not about that. Nor is it about perfection, ‘enlightenment’ or taking spiritual paths, etc., all of which can become unnecessarily self-punitive. Whereas being vegan isn’t (despite appearances!).
It’s about being okay with the process of change and of being at ease with life being continual change. Revision, discovery, creativity - this sort of exploring helps to build character but more importantly it alerts the rebel in us and helps us ask the right questions. For instance, “why can’t I be bothered about the very things which most need bothering about?”
By starting with the most bothering case (namely the routine abuse of sensitive and sentient beings) vegans expand their sense of responsibility, but where does that lead?
We all know how to treat our nearest and dearest (with love & affection, etc.) but why stop there? There’s no reason to stop anywhere, humans, animals, environment, all of it. There’s no thing that doesn’t deserve our attention as they pass within range.

Doing without

Monday 1st March 2010

Veganism is dependable. It mirrors our day-to-day life. It monitors non-violence (in the food we eat) and non-violence in everything else we do too. Taking this to its glorious extreme, I suppose one could say that in terms of regard, there cannot be any difference between regard for the non-sentient and the sentient. I reckon being vegan develops respect for pots and pans and cars and kids. Maybe that’s drawing a rather long bow, but when I considered becoming a vegan it was always going to be for the bigger reasons, bigger than just avoiding animal food (life being not only about food and clothes!!).
We are all consumers. We’re all users of resources and we know full well that, environmentally, we’re all treading on the roses. But we know we should tread more lightly, value things more, do the “right” things more if only to appreciate better the power everything has on us … and speaking of power, surely at one time or another, we’ve all recognised that we each have a powerful ability to transform ourselves - from clod-hopping brute to sensitive, gentle adult? We can transform ourselves if we want to … if that’s where we want to go. It’s our choice, either to grab whatever we can or to be more constructive. Maybe the time of squandering is past. Maybe we need to become less emotionally engaged with ‘things’ and learn to live a more Spartan life. If we can be less attached to ‘stuff’ and remain fully satisfied with that sort of life, well then, I reckon we’ve made it!