Why vegans go out on a limb

105:

The group, shall I call it ‘Vegans Incorporated’, is my family, my ‘group’. It’s nice to belong - to be amongst people I can identify with. Even nicer to feel special. We all want to feel special. We like being special to our family, to our circle of friends. Most of all we’d like to be special to our whole town … and what we wouldn’t give to be famous in our own country? The bigger the group that 'knows us and respects us’ the more special we’ll feel. I could almost sell my soul for fame - ego dreaming of the great prize. The ‘on-top’ people then have to be squeaky clean, nothing in their past, etc, and if that’s all clear the it’s the Big-Life for them, enjoyment-wise ... but, on condition they stay loyal to an ugly Society. When the goals of our society seem wrong and we have to seriously move away from it, we can expect people’s deliberate misunderstanding of us. Naturally this ain’t pleasant. It’s the opposite of approval. It’s the kiss-of-death to social ambition and we end up feeling alienated. And that’s very similar to punishment. No one likes being excluded. No one wants to be a freak.
Yet vegans accept all this downside and stand against their almost-whole society to earn the chance to explain why.
Most don’t, or won’t. They stay doing what others do.
As a society we dress the same, talk the same, behave the same … that is, until we come to something we can’t accept, which we must speak out against, even if we’re going to be harshly judged for it. To us that very judgement is the worst thing we have to put up with from our society. It’s the unfairness of the judgement that makes many of us so angry, because some very sensible stuff is nakedly being ignored.
Animal Rights advocates often feel like victims. The danger of this is that we show it. And it looks martyry. And that translates as superior. And it’s that which is confronted. And when confronted we react, as if we’re a burglar caught in the act of a crime. We twitch at being ‘seen-through’. For a conceit at feeling superior to others. With our swag of sharp arguments we then become the victimiser, judging people who don’t agree with us.
The real reason behind Society’s harsh judgment is that we are following our principles, principles which are largely not-thought-about. It’s why omnivores are so antipathetic.
From our vegan point of view it seems like a no-win game we play with our adversaries: it starts off reasonably enough, then turns aggressive, and once true dialogue stops and the bun-fight starts we know it’s all gone pear-shaped. Maybe we even blow our whole relationship with a person, by getting too over the top with what we say. Showing our true aggro side. Unfortunately some of us do get aggressive in order to make ourselves be heard, to show how deeply we feel about Animal Rights issues … and then it’s a fine line between being assertive and being aggressive. To be outrageously noisy is one thing - making value judgements about people to their faces is usually counter productive.
Today, at a place I was working, the client said to me, “I see you’re a vegetarian” (he’d read the slogans on my bike, thought it said something about animal eating) and I hit back with “Yes, I don’t eat what you’re eating” (stew for lunch). I thought about it afterwards. That was a rude way of saying it a much better way ... if I’d given myself time to think. Of course it sounded rude to me as soon as it’d left my mouth, so I smoothed it over … but I was ashamed of myself ... he’s a really nice guy and very old too.
I was miffed because he’d been cooking beef for his lunch and I couldn’t stand the smell and had to go out for about an hour, that’s me polite, never saying a word about it ... it being his place after all and he innocently just making himself some lunch, as he does everyday.
I looked back on it, when I got home this evening. I got to thinking “me different to him” ... apart from his beef lunch and he being thirty years older than me, he was a nicer person than me. And that made me think!
As soon as there’s any disapproval in my mind, however convincing my argument, the message of it gets lost-in-delivery, in the sound our words make. When the message doesn’t actually get across we aren’t much help to the animals.
The anti-bonus here is that, after any bun-fight, we get a reputation for being a bit aggressive. That way we lose support all round. And the losing of friends isn’t the main aim here! It’s not to make war that we go out on a limb in the first place.