The gulf is great

Judgement aside, it IS valuable to see what is happening ‘out there’. Judgement is a misleading directive and unhelpful for taking on the enormous task of communicating this subject; people are of a pattern and it’s useful for vegans to be able to see the pattern. We don’t have to be judging, just seeing, observing so we can better grasp the hugeness of the task ahead of us, that of communicating and engaging.
Things have come on a long way since the 1970’s but not far enough to scratch the surface. It’s great that the vegan movement has emerged but sad it’s still so slow to catch on. Things have in fact gone badly wrong in the lives of so many people - their hearts have hardened. Habit has done it.
An intelligent close friend who is an omnivore firmly holds the belief that “humans are naturally omnivorous”. That is the platform on which she rests all her beliefs about food. She’s exemplary about her environmental habits, her political leanings and her sense of humour is second to none, but here is the one big sticking point - she says it’s wrong to eat meat but NATURAL to eat animal products. The animal isn’t killed for her milk or her eggs. (Oh no?)
In that one obstinacy (or it could be more kindly described as a misapprehension), the egg and the milk and hundreds of products using these base products is justified. The idea of a totally plant-based regime is resisted more hotly by her than a meatless diet would be by a carnivore. Vegetarians can be the most resistant to veganism because of the great strides they’ve made away from killing animals for meat. They are proud of what they’ve done, as they should be. They’ve stretched as far as they can, away from the norm.
I keep using the identifier ‘omnivore’ not to describe the whole person but a very important part of that person’s habit pattern and one which, to vegans, is the pattern most urgently in need of reappraisal. The habits of one’s own life, especially after a few years into adulthood, are so strongly laid down that we become be-habited - in this instance, once we get used to using animals for our convenience it’s a hard one to stop. What we longed for as youngsters - to enter the adult world - now rests on our acceptance by it. If we are to be taken seriously as young adults it will be by other adults, almost all of whom will be deeply ‘behabited’. They themselves will be on the lookout for similarities of habit from anyone they come to know. The co-justification process powers forth and it’s only the tiny scrap of niggling empathy and compassion from our upbringing or our innate nature that might just safeguard us from being swept away by the tide of normality.