The mental block

Sunday 29th May 2010

Prioritising is an advantage. We see what’s most important, the issues which needs special effort from us, but there’s a danger of putting off dealing with other important issues. Omnivores who are environmentalists and working for social justice may decide to put ‘animals’ on the everlasting backburner.
The process of assessing and reassessing priorities may be tedious but it forces us to look deeper. The deeper we look the more obvious is ‘the conspiracy’ (it’s handy to call it a ‘conspiracy’ since issues not in the ‘public interest’ are down graded quite actively by the vested interests. Denigrating the ‘bleeding hearts’ and ‘lettuce leaf eaters’ is as much part of the promotion game as pushing chicken nuggets. Put it any way you like: the wicked 1%’ers crushing the rights of the proletariat, it doesn’t help much but the idea of conspiracy helps make important links - health issues link to food, to the animals, to the environment, to the unfair food distribution around the world. The links are obvious enough once you dare to look and each of us are drawn to a particular ‘worst issue’ but it’s wise to keep a weather eye on all the rest. Is this too overwhelming?
If it is too much to take on board we must address our own comfort in living amongst so many worrying issues. Having a direction through it all (for instance, the vegan might have an angle on almost all issues by seeing them as manifestations of the violence within society), seeing the thread that links so many specific abuses helps us to develop habits that are NOT destructive and yet which we hardly notice being changed. New habits settle in and become as comfortable as the old ones. We have an autopilot for this. We must get using it to help us move along, to get essential work done, to help us avoid getting side-tracked.
I think the way it starts is that we set up a train of habits we know we can more or less handle. They’re aimed at our having minimal negative impact on the planet. Eventually we heal our own reputation – the human race aiming collectively to atone, especially in the eyes of the animals who’re the MOST abused of all our resources, the most damaged part of Nature.