Oafs

Blog Friday 4th June 2010
What is it, when people behave badly, that then lets them NOT think ill of themselves? Perhaps it’s a slow process, almost as slowly as evolution itself, moulding normality into the way it is done. I’m okay because I’m normal, doing no worse than others. Who is this humans who has an arrogant sense of being special, privileged and the ultimate saviour of the planet. Are humans meant to be the dominant species, have a role to play in taking primitive lifeforms and transforming them into sophisticated beings? It’s as if humans have swallowed a sci-fi fantasy leading them to not question the dominator role … the human prerogative to be the way we are.
If we put it this way it makes us sound like oafs, but that’s more or less what we are by what we do. And alongside that we do some really wonderful things. We have become mesmerised by our own achievements and conveniently forgotten how we’ve paid for them. Our oafishness, arrogance and insecurity we inherit from our culture, parents, etc, and if we don’t spot it soon enough it all stays with us. It comforts the lonely and emboldens the value of ‘me-first’. It says “I must succeed within about seventy or eighty years of life”. If I fail I will be unhappy.
Only when we come to question this do other things fall into place and we se why we must start to change. Talk about a breathing space, this is one big space, not that there isn’t urgency but no reason to be hasty. Slowness of purpose doesn’t always indicate indecision, it sometimes shows patience and long term purpose.
Vegan Animal Rights, the movement, has embarked on a long struggle which could end overnight if the collective attitude changed, but maybe we have to endure this awful world as iut is for quite a bit longer yet, as if the time it changes hasn’t yet arrived and during these intervening years people who are part of the Movement are exploring ways of communicating the idea that all animals are royal.