Gut service

However omnivores see themselves they’re pulled in two directions at once. Vegans have relieved themselves of that pressure.
For omnivores, it always comes down to their own safety and comfort. Convenience calls the shots. It’s my comfort versus the animal gulag down the road. 2010 promises every luxury you can imagine … but at what cost? Many animals must die to provide for our safety and comfort, and before that they’re imprisoned in ultra-slum conditions.
The very thought of that could be enough to keep the omnivore awake at night, and that’s just for starters. Our brain tells us one thing and our gut feeling another. Gut says be careful. This all smells of pernicious danger. Our gut feeling says we aren’t safe. On the one hand we’re being poisoned (with animal stuff, as well as other things) but we’re used to it … and yet as we get older we notice the slow effects of our diet over the years. We aren’t comfortable. Our stomach is full enough but something has gone sluggish. We have safety and comfort. But it’s all up in the mind not in the gut.
“Gut” is the digestive tract. But it’s also the word for instinct. Also the word for courage. Maybe our brains are in touch with the gut. Warning us of danger, calling up bravery. Gut gets us out of the danger. But gut also means to rip the innards out of a living being, as in gutting a fish. It means hanging-drawing and quartering the animal. It means one of the worst violences we’ve ever dreamt up - cutting into a suffocating victim. Humans don’t suffer gutting but we use the word to stand for shocked – “gutted”. And vegans are gutted by the unreported horror story going on all about us so we are at the opposite, safe, comfortable and without having to feel gutted every time we open our digestive tract and drop violence into it.
At the opposite ‘vegan’ end is guts. What we need to answer a call for self-sacrificing courage. We reckon this promises us “comfort” – that’s the finest foods plus a much sought after fearlessness state to live in. But omnivores beware, one act of vegetarian ‘goodness’ does not solve very much at all. Fearlessness there isn’t. A fridge full of little comforts don’t fall off trees, they come stamped with execution too. Although animal products give comfort they’re haunting us (and silently poisoning us at the same time).
But guts does not a fine person make. Life has tension and within ‘gut’ there’s conflict - temptation, guilt, a fattening-food fear of a growing gut. How do we deal with each of these and still lie straight in our beds, erm … I mean get all the sleep we need.
I suspect vegans sleep well at night, relatively un-plagued by fatness or guilt about animal cruelty … b. b.bbut, the stakes are high. For vegans. Instead of guilt we take on a responsibility for a whole planet. A big job.
Vegans would love you alongside – your support is the most valuable thing to establish vegan principle, as a going concern. Animals need your support as much as vegans want to be of service to omnivores, in this matter.