We know what should happen but not necessarily what’s likely to happen, but one thing is for sure - what we have to say is simple but the saying of it is not. Just believing something doesn’t guarantee we’ll succeed in communicating it.
Famous professors who know so much valuable stuff don’t always know how to get it across, so what they say goes to waste. Same with we ordinary people, with just simple things to say, we’re all subject to reception, to audience response. What we want to avoid is a negative reaction. Apart from anything else it will affect us badly, as communicators.
We mustn’t take it too badly - the unencouraging response we often get when telling people about ‘what happens to animals’. We mainly need to know that we can handle the disappointment when people push us away (or pretend not to understand). I’d suggest we are wasting our time judging them or disliking them for “not understanding”. Worse, we’re undermining our own confidence as communicators.
At the heart of the problem is the queering of our own pitch. When we’re talking to people about vegan matters or animal matters, there’s a tendency to NOT see ourselves at fault (failing to engaging people) but to shift blame onto them. We blame their lack of understanding of what we’re saying, whereas at the heart of this is our own judgement giving off a bad smell. We say, “They are stupid so they can’t understand me”. “They are wrong/ evil/ been brought up with poor values/ etc. which is why they can’t/ don’t/ won’t understand me”.
The judgement’s easy to make because omnivores are different in one very identifiable way - they eat differently. In this single difference we can see they’ve no time for our values ... regarding the sanctity of animals. So we use that as a platform for judging them. “They BAD. Almost recidivistic” (... for what they do or eat). Imagine that sort of opinion coming across to you if you’re one of the billions of people for just eating ‘normal’ food. Normality has a long way to shift before getting anywhere near to where we are, as vegans, and how we see things.
Monday, November 29, 2010
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