Not letting our side down

258:

All of us are trained from childhood to make judgements of other people - if someone seems bad or stupid or weak our judging of them makes us feel better about ourselves. We like to feel superior. It’s a god-on-my-side sort of feeling. But by being vegan we are also trying to win recognition of an important principle, which should be bigger than the satisfaction of feeling better-than.
It’s the principle that counts. It should never be about me and my progress towards enlightenment but about the abolition of animal enslavement and the realisation of its importance. Therefore I shouldn’t be too quick to judge others, for fear of doing damage to the Animal Rights movement itself. I, as a vegan, represent other vegans and their reputation. By judging those who aren’t thinking like me, it’s guaranteed to turn them away from a particular way of thinking that they might have come round to, in time.
Memory plays tricks on us when we think we’ve always been on the right track. I wasn’t always vegan. I had another viewpoint once. Along the way I changed. It hit me that it was a good idea. Is it possible that I might NOT have become vegan if I’d met up with a judgemental vegan and found them too unattractive to identify with?
Feeling safe as a vegan should cancel out any need to be judgemental. The violence in our society stems from some people being thought of as inferior, and reacting accordingly. If I encourage that, I add to the problem of making others feel inferior, and why would I want to do that? Maybe somewhere in my past I was taught that a little violence kept others in their place or that it would force them to rise to a higher level, assuming of course that they needed to be improved.
Being in the right can, ironically, put us in the wrong when judgement, aggression and a disregard for the non-violent principle contradicts all the good that we believe in.