Communication and optimism

An optimistic vegan is like a small boat in a rough sea, facing up to a whole array of challenges, rewards and emotional outbursts (‘animal-people’ get emotional!). However grim things seem, however gloomy the outlook, optimism must remain the driving force; we must aim to succeed against the current reality of this animal-abusing society.
We have a set of values and we need to stick to them up to the end. The reality taunts us with how big the turn-around will have to be but it keeps us on our toes. Unless we keep optimistic we’re merely fighting a rear-guard action and that’s no fun. The greatest satisfaction for any proselytising vegan is in standing up to our detractors and holding firmly to the most optimistic outcome.
Both omnivores and some within the Animal Rights Movement are loyal to the god of failure. They refuse to see it all changing. They try to squash optimism. They come from different directions to each other, but each tell the same story - how impossible the task is. Human attitude won’t change. They either think selfishness will always win out or that governments will always be too weak to alter things, never accepting for one moment that the ugly, poisonous stuff stolen from animals’ bodies or the corpses of the animals themselves will be turned away from as people wise up to the world they’re living in.
Whether it’s the gloom of fellow activists or the hopelessness of trying to alter the eating habits of the vast majority of the population, always it’s the gloomy reality that tries to warn us not to expect the impossible. And yet people do change, are changing - just look at the many, many vegetarians there are today after a mere thirty or forty years where before that there were practically none. And now there are many considering going vegan and many practising vegans willing to speak up, about issues. Anyone heading towards their own ideals would have to agree that it is dangerously counterproductive to be defeatist, especially since we are at such an early stage of consciousness-change.
Optimism becomes more of a reality when you think of work pleasurably - the whole task of trying to change vast numbers of people’s minds isn’t made difficult by the ‘impossibility’ of getting a good result, it’s made difficult by our own grumbling sense of inevitable failure. Since we’ll never know what might happen up the track (in people changing their attitudes) we can’t afford to fail before we’ve started. It helps for us to remember just what has to happen, the sequence of things, how it was for us; what barriers have to fall before the next one is exposed, and in turn falls to the next.
Here we are, moving from a basically, fairly selfish life (human-centred at least) to another type of life, with a different perspective; we find we’re doing something for ourselves but that becomes ‘doing something for others’, and that fits in with our overall aim. “Work”, always associated before with boredom and reluctant effort, is becoming something entirely different too. Drudgery-work turns into a pleasure because it has purpose. What a surprise! The odds against us don’t have to be a serious consideration, as long as we’re determined and heading in the most (vegan) principled direction.
A correspondent’s reporting work can be gratifying in the midst of what looks like an impossible war - vegan advocates are merely reporting some little-known home truths, both about ourselves and about what humans are doing to animals. The outcome will be as it will be.