Food-like

The tastelessness of the vegetables and the poisons sprayed on crops has brought people towards organic produce. It’s been slow but gradually it’s catching on, especially where the prices aren’t too high. The same will happen with cruelty-free items, which will likely be healthier and yummier too, but that particular ‘reason-for-buying’ has yet to be widespread ... which comes back to ‘animal consciousness’. A double whammy in that people aren’t sensitive yet (to the plight of animals and their own part in it as consumers) but also their problem with vegans. They have problems about people like us, who are jumping around but not communicating somehow, like loony people who can’t relate, somehow... people are still confused about us and we maybe aren’t being entirely kosher with them. We look down our noses at them and don’t look them straight in the eye when we talk to them. Maybe I’m just talking about myself here?
In the Animal Rights movement, if we’ve been less than successful (so far) it hasn’t been because our hearts were in the wrong place but because our heads maybe were. Guidance needs to be come from both places at once, not one at the expense of the other.
In our particular ‘movement’, it would surely heart leading (soft side, “love thy neighbour”, praise and progress and non-judgement, etc. Then hard on heart’s heels, the head. But here we have a small problem. Do we approach other people hard or soft?
If we may have one collective fault - we are workshy. No, not lazy exactly, just too pessimistic to invest lots of energy into something which doesn’t seem to have prospects for overall solution-to-problem, ... inaction. Stasis occurs ... which is what we have today. Slough. Sluff
To crank the old machine up we have quite a lot of work to do, setting things up for future generations, secure future, etc. The game-plan has already been set out by some great vegan writers, and these need to be read. That’s quite hard work until you get into the habit of this sort of reading. It is “work” and we are shy of all sorts of work. and for some of us it’s hard to read the material. And alongside, it’s important to see things too. To have seen the actual abuse on a DVD, not too many times, but at least once. To have clear recall of what you read about then saw in practice ... being done to the farm animals. That’s another sort of hard work.
From reading and seeing we can gather arguments and information to form a picture, ready. Vegans need to be ready just in case we get the chance to speak. We only need to do it a few times and for reception to feel okay for us to know who we are, when talking Animal Rights stuff. After reaching a point where we can talk about veganism and football in the same breath, almost anyway, and for there to be hardly a flutter of judgement sneaking into the conversation, only then can we enjoy ourselves ... all the way to the bank. No, I don’t mean getting rich, I mean getting the poor bloody animals on their way, to becoming liberated. Little events in our day, something pushes this boat out a little further. All that progress is riches for us of course!! … but back to this balancing act… I’m suggesting we’re a bit out of balance, or have been. A tad superficial maybe? I’m suggesting we are, in the Animal Rights Movement, a bit unimaginative, by not being creative enough in our approach. It’s still very much vegans versus omnivores. Still the battle mood. We’re still copying past rebels and revolutionaries … and that’s great for other sorts of revolutions but not this one.
This is a soft revolution, all volunteering and cooperating not some fierce political mob, all shout but with no real balls.
In the past, with all good intention, we’ve gone the way of the Bolsheviks, giving people slogan-snacks instead of feeding them education. We’ve had good old morality hitching a lift saying bad, bad, bad. We’re strict types, humans. We keep going Calvinistic on ourselves. We’re hard intellectuals going ascetic, downplaying attraction. We can often seem, from our behaviour, like a religious, self-diciplinarians. On top of that (or because of that) we’ve taken on a ‘high moral ground’ tone - we’ve been too free with our judgements. We’ve talked down to omnivores, talking to then like little kids. Worst of all we’ve implied stupidity.
Teachers know that when a student can’t see something it’s put it down to stupidity rather than faulty teaching technique. I’m suggesting we vegans never really give others a chance nor, come to that, a challenge.
A vegan is a display unit. We should be able to show, at the drop of a hat, our version of ‘a better way of living’; we shouldn’t be telling people what to do but what they’d need to know.
If they ever want to change, for those still listening, they need to be shown how to make a safe transition. They need advice maybe, but most of all they need time to weigh these things up for themselves. They don’t need slogans, pushings, shovings, or orders to think the way we think.
Specifically, we haven’t worked out yet, how to get people interested, let alone impassioned, let alone to actually like us!