Do something about it

332:

Perhaps as consumers we are not only brainwashed by misinformation but bedazzled by the abundance of commodities in our shops. Steaks, rich dairy foods, soft woollen jumpers, elegant leather jackets plus many other affordable items, too numerous to mention. It’s all so attractive. It’s like an Aladdin’s cave which we can’t walk by without going in. We can’t pass up the chance to go in and buy them, these products, these co-products and by-products of animal origin. None of us wants to miss out on the treasure trove, so we don’t look too closely at the fine detail. We let the horror story of animal cruelty go unremarked.
But what goes on in the privacy of the human mind, regarding the wrong of it all? We tell ourselves that we don’t want to see it. And if we do take notice we might admit that “Something has to change ... but let it not start with ‘me’ ... I’ll join you once you’re up and running - I don’t want to start the ball rolling”. But the ball has been rolling for some seventy years and still not many are ‘joining’.
An example: my ‘vehicle’ is lying in a ditch. It has broken down and obviously it isn’t going to repair itself. It will lie there until I do something about it.
If something needs to be done in this world of ours, surely I need to start doing what needs to be done, and what you choose to do is none of my business. It’s a matter between me and my conscience. And I know that the less I take notice of my conscience the weaker my central safety mechanism is ... until I get to a point where I’m no longer effectively in control, where I hand the controls to those who are only too eager to take them up.
As I might mindlessly wander into a shop and spend my money on questionable products, so I might have done something I will regret later. If I keep on doing it there’ll come a time when I’m helpless to put any of it right again. Recently when the full impact of killing cattle was shown on one of our most popular TV current affaires investigation programmes, it didn’t require much of a leap of imagination to see how any beef-eater is implicated. We were shown ugly scenes of how cattle were being killed. I heard a lot of talk about that programme, from meat-eaters, who were perhaps trying in vain to absolve themselves from what they were witnessing ... and by now regretting.