Stepping out

254:

I’m always reminded of Alice’s (in Wonderland) surprise when she steps into another world inhabited by strange beings and they don’t respond to her as she expects - it reminds me of the general human obstinacy to obvious answers. It reminds me of people suffering unnecessarily just to preserve the rightness of what they do.
In our world all the obvious answers seem to be staring us in the face but most people refuse to see them because they’re afraid of change. They don’t want to risk something they don’t fully understand, which even seems too ridiculously simple to work. I don’t mean economic problems which governments have to solve or huge global problems that can only be solved when everyone acts together. And I don’t mean standing up to danger and martyring ourselves for a principle. I mean something we can do at home which will transform our own lives and eventually set a global trend.
Vegans, acting at first out of raw outrage, take something from an unfamiliar dimension and install it as a routine in their own lives. The boycott a vegan installs is ridiculed and often causes friction with family and friends, but when the instinct is strong (and, for most vegans, it’s a gut feeling we have), when something is fundamentally wrong, there’s an overwhelming urge to act.
In the great lucky-dip of life, the luckiest one is becoming convinced of the truth of non-violence. By applying that principle (avoiding gratuitous violence) it’s likely we’ll start to get lucky, according to the law of just returns - that what goes around comes around, good karma, etc. I’m superstitious about violence and dishonesty, so I believe that if you give it out you get it back, and if you don’t do it, it can’t touch you. It appeals to my simple view of life, that I can tailor my life so the unnecessary ‘horribles’ aren’t invited in.
To non-vegans, who haven’t looked at things this way, it mightn’t seem significant enough, or not likely to be effective enough. So they blunder on and get rough treatment back - you can invest in a peace-deal or allow chaos to take a hold.
Some say “life is too short to worry about such details”. Why be bothered with the trivial details vegans worry about ... which is why vegans themselves need to explain why vegan principle is so central to the future sustainability of the planet. And it’s why I think that ‘holding firmly to the truth’ (or Ghandi’s idea of the “force which is born of truth and love or non-violence”) is so important. It has certainly transformed many people’s lives for the better, mine included. But the obstinacy ‘out there’, amongst most people who do what they’ve always done, for them nothing like this has happened to them - nothing has been transformed and so no one principle is capable of making a transformative change ... so they stick with what they know and help to perpetuate the very violence which is killing the human spirit.
Vegan arguments emphasise the importance of not being cruel to weak beings or destructive of beautiful things or wasteful of earthly bounties. If vegans are going to influence others we can’t just glow and be beheld, we have to argue our case hard and show by our own behaviour and an anti-bullying, anti-exploitative approach, that we have the tools to convince with.