Absurd behaviour

Oh, our thirst for diversion and the absurdity of what we’ll do in that cause. It’s all spurred on by money-making, big business and the consumer consumes what they offer. Corporate interests cash in - we sow the seed and they exacerbate the damage.
You can hardly blame the profiteers for taking advantage of us. We’re gullible enough not to notice what’s they’re doing. We’re complaint. We’re fed continuous advice. Our noses are rubbed in the swill of commercial advertising, for that’s the price we pay for being entertained or diverted. We do love a good story, in fact any story. But the essential facts of life, that story they hide from us. We barely hear anything about waste and cruelty. That’s one of the not-nice stories. Instead we are given pleasant stories and the all the means to enjoy them. Because of the fierce competition for our consumer dollar we have to be continuously sold these stories, varieties of the same thing. And from that transpires a tedious sales pitch.
The big selling point is the heavy emphasis on treats and food sensations. We are told “Buy our cheese, buy our biscuits, buy into a lobster dinner sitting by the lagoon”. In other words, what they sell assumes a humano-centred attitude (that animals don’t matter and are for eating). The ads for animal foods stand alongside ads for soap powder and, overall, they tell us how to lead ‘an easy, cool lifestyle’.
Advertising ploughs, like a tank amongst rose bushes, past empathy for animals, past the unhealthiness of eating them and arrives at an easy acceptance that animals are merely objects-for-eating. The tackiness of these ads! There are bits of dead animal everywhere. Tedious they certainly are, and for people who get involved in this ‘advertised’, how tedious life must be for them.
But all of us, we all have to put up with ‘the ads’. What we see is, more or less, what’s on offer. We assume there’s nothing else, not cheap enough, or available enough, or immediate enough to be of any sort of interest, anyway. Most people comply with a “white-goods” mentality – they take part in a world that is advertised. It’s the best on offer. It seems there’s no other cogent world that could appeal to customers. We might not exactly accept the status quo but it’s what we know. We go along with it, because if there are things we don’t like, there’s nothing much we can do about it. So, we comply. We cooperate.
But vegans don’t. We push it aside by disassociating from its most commonly shared activity, the ingesting of said bits of dead animal. By actively boycotting every commercial item which has any animal connection we make our protest. Our most active protests might reach zero audience but make them we must to bring some sort of hope to those who are living in the ‘closed world’. Almost all people, whether educated or uneducated, don’t believe there’s any chance to escape the pit. Their attitude is, “why bother?”
By our jumping-ahead (of this pessimism) we focus directly on mass escape - all more or less at the same time. Not in the same precise moment but all during the same time slot.
For us ordinary vegans, we need to focus on ordinary people like us, and have faith in their ability to weigh up the situation and decide for themselves, just as we did. As vegans we need to recognise the remarkable talents we humans have, in our ability to adapt and change to suit each new situation. We should have faith that we, ordinary as we may be, will do just that.
When the time comes, as it surely will, when change will be the difference between survival and non-survival, then at that point our choosing will come down to our faith, not in gods or happenstance but in people themselves; our/their talent, our/their enduring optimism and our collective self-confidence. Omnivores are teachers because teachers are usually omnivores. Teachers are not often vegan, but vegans almost certainly will be the teachers of the future. They’ll be teachers of optimism, who teach that pessimism doesn’t exist ... well, that it doesn’t have to anyway.
When change comes, optimism will arrive to help that change take place. Think it will come out of human determination to make pessimism disappear simply because it doesn’t need to exist. And the more we can convince others of its redundancy the more inclined they’ll be to listen to what we have to say about veganism.
By giving up judgement, giving up gossip, giving up blaming, shaming and all the other sour habits we have, by giving up the sheer gloominess of attitude, we avoid personal collapse and perhaps collectively avert world disaster. Non-judgement lets us modify our sense of shame and guilt, and pick up something much better.
The main reason we can drop pessimism is to find another, more upbeat reason to live. If we can’t get past our gloominess we won’t be able to let our imagination fly. We just won’t see how the process of change can start to take place when there’s not enough imagination and optimism.