Turning away

If people are refusing to look at the question of animal exploitation, maybe it’s because they like their ‘food’ too much. How does that make vegans feel? Usually it’s quite depressing but so what? We, all of us, vegans included, are refusing to face certain smelly bits about our lives … some being more important than others, but so what? We all face-down to some things so we can face-up to others.
In the most absurd case we have a person who says “I won’t go vegan. I already support charities”, making it look as though being vegan is like doing charity work. It looks as though we are the type of people who like being nice to animals. Maybe people think our rationale (for ‘being vegan’) is to earn brownie points by suffering a bit of deprivation. Maybe our being vegan makes us feel less guilty.
Some of this is true, some so wide of the mark that if people do think this way they need to be disabused of it. When it comes to ‘veganism’ most people don’t have the remotest idea what it stands for. All they know is that it involves eating lots of vegetables. They often joke about it - that vegans eat beans, fart a lot and get over-serious about issues (undefined).
Now – this is when perhaps people see vegans this way. Our job is surely to continuously throw up the challenge. Say “all this is about to change”. About to? … I mean once just a few more people join the boycott.
If omnivores aren’t completely stupid then they’re cunning: they may know about vegan and may have worked out private ways to get around the problem. All fairly private - and that’s why they do so hate it when vegans challenge them to a verbal duel. So horrible a prospect is it, for omnivores to contemplate being made to look stupid or brutal, that they’ll avoid this sort of conversation like the plague.
They will, drop of the hat, try to convince anyone about that the nasty vegan is being aggressive. This brings down a tonne of disapproval far outweighing the personality-fault the vegan seems to be alluding to (and this is why we shouldn’t give them any excuse to point the finger). If we can disprove this, that we are NOT aggressive, then I reckon we’re home and hosed.
But before that happens we need to see who omnivores are. We need to realise that for the average omnivore it’s always a case of what we see is what it means: what we don’t see can’t mean anything at all.
For your average omnivore the blind-eye hasn’t opened and the mind-jump hasn’t yet happened – they haven’t considered sentience – or if they have it comes up saying “animals” and they panic about foods they love from ‘food-animals’ and retreat backwards at the rate of knots. The classic no-go zone is right there. A classic taboo. Even before any ‘dangerous thoughts’ have had time to germinate a fatwa is declared on all notions dealing with sentience. It’s refused entry. In the citadel which is ‘me’, all the go-zones and no-go zones are distinctly marked.
Are we happy about that? And are we happy about the bits of our own personality we don’t like? I bet every one of us has a shopping list of these traits. And so if we do have things we’re not proud of, then what are they and how do we fix them?
What things are meaningful? Surely, that is the question. Why carry round a nasty smell all your life?