What’s the point of going vegan?

Saturday 10th April 2010

It’s understandable that pessimism is popular. We’ve certainly got a lot to be sad about today, but where does pessimism get us? If we’re beating ourselves up with shame and guilt and becoming preoccupied with it, we’ll forget about some of the trickier issues. We’ll sideline the most personally inconveniencing issues to concentrate on what we are told are the more urgent issues.
We certainly have many serious and urgent global problems to deal with, none easy to solve and none easy to feel effective about, personally. We worry heaps. And that diverts us from thinking constructively. We ask: “What I can do about ‘it?” and then obstinately refuse to see the connections between world problems and the principles which veganism characterises (and espouses). If we can’t get a clear run at major global problems because we think they are too big, we give up trying to run at them at all. And since we believe everything is out of our control anyway, we won’t go to all the inconvenience of taking on a vegan lifestyle in the first place.