Vegans starting out

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When I decided to do something, to protest, to speak out, to become vegan, the first thing I noticed was that my own self esteem received a boost, and that felt good. But then I made a mistake. I thought others would notice it. Notice me ...and want to follow suit. But no, it ain’t necessarily so. Just becoming vegan is all I could do at first, while waiting for the penny to drop with others.
You can’t just go up to people and suggest they change. There’s no direct action that shifts a mind-set. All I reckoned I could do was wait ... let them come to their senses in their own time. Nah, I can’t resist, as other vegans can’t resist, urging people to wake up. But it interests me that people seem to want to stay asleep over animal issues. Probably for safety reason? When any of us first contemplated a vegan lifestyle we probably considered all the obstacles first - and until these were cleared up to some extent, the mind, our minds, my mind certainly prohibited my taking such a radical step. I kept asking if it was safe? I eventually decided that it seemed to be so.
That’s what practising vegans look into. They read, they talk, they question and conclude ... that the risk is worth taking. In 1943, when all this started, it rested on a belief that one could physically survive on plants. It sounded bizarre and dangerous then, but in hindsight we can see that things today are very different, to what they were in 1943. We’ve made great advances in understanding nutrition, and we’ve been given lots of food choices which not so long ago people didn’t have. Now we ask what food and clothing can’t be manufactured from plants? Certainly egg white is valuable to the chef just as leather protects our feet in the rain, but apart from that the advantages of animal products are they worth torturing millions of animals for?
The reason why vegan thinking and vegan eating and vegan clothing is so important is that vegans are showing others that physical survival is possible without recourse to animals. Those of us on vegan diets, for instance, have found remarkable improvements in health and well being.
At first though, my experiments were glitch-ed - my body needed time to readjust and, on a social level, relationships needed time to acclimatise. I had to work on various levels simultaneously, until things were running smoothly. Vegan diets are not a complete panacea. Food, however good it is, won’t necessarily bring us any closer to loving or non-separation from others. But, for me, it did install non-violence into my thinking - and by doing what I was doing, by going vegan and avoiding all that nasty animal food, I was also avoiding the nastier side of my nature coming out.