Picking-up on vegan

Sunday 12th September 2010

I’m suggesting, especially for long term activists, that the good old standby, ‘shock-horror’ approach, needs a tweak. It’s been a lot of fun, out on protests, with mates in a group, screaming about the horrors of animal abuse. But it’s cost us a lot too, since we trashed our credibility to some extent.
It felt good to protest this way, it felt ‘right’. Justified. But the after the seventies a more sophisticated communication came along and showed us ‘cooler’ ways to talk to each other.
If there’s a germ of dislike or disapproval in our speech, whatever we say will smell ‘off’. To the omnivore that is made even easier if there’s a whiff of hypocrisy too, when they can show we’re wrong about something … and therefore likely to be wrong about everything.
That’s the reason surely why poorly-informed vegans get so uptight when their information is challenged. That may be down to the fact that we haven’t necessarily checked out what we are saying. But once our cover is blown, that we aren’t entirely ‘cool’, that we can be upset … then our ‘uptight’ could be anger, could be quarrelsome or could even be violent, each a step towards the other. The reason our information doesn’t impress people is more to do with our antics when under fire.