The antidote

Sunday 4th April 2010

To fix our collective pessimistic fixed views vegans argue that the switch can be flipped - by boycotting. By convincing others why they should boycott we highlight what is most destructive in our society; by dropping our participation in that we automatically start to drop our pessimism. But there’s a little personal cost at first.
It means we start to avoid buying things we might have always enjoyed. But isn’t that a small price to pay to reverse so much dangerous destruction? It isn’t the only price – we realise by letting go so many popular food items and having such a clear ethical reason for doing so we pit ourselves against most people’s attitudes towards the using of food animals. The pessimism, the drabness of conventional attitude, the de facto cruelty people are associated with, all this is reversed by a simple boycott of products. As difficult as this may seem, it happens to be the antidote to a very entrenched illness amongst humans.