Rushing to the rescue

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Obviously boycotting animal products isn't easy, especially at first. Our addiction to many products on the market is entrenched. And yet we know, as a species, we're highly adaptive and that change isn't really as hard as we think it might be.
Many of us want to be rushing to the rescue - we have ideals to be realised. We know this will mean making a big statement, and for that we need to be adept at making practical changes to our lives, so that we can back up our words.
What is the idealist most up against? Perhaps in the case of animal welfare it’s the majority attitude of pitilessness. The lives of domesticated animals tests the pity in us, and if we can feel enough empathy we’ll make some difficult, personal lifestyle changes to show solidarity, on their behalf. Hopefully it will lift us up to such a level of altruism that we become better in every way - kinder, 'greener', 'vegan'. But this 'vegan' thing, even if it weren't about animals or health, it would still be the most logical and intelligent way to go.
By being vegan we are, to some extent, in a state of self control over our food habits. That in itself is empowering. But there’s the pay-back too, in the food itself; the highly energising plant foods are an aid to thinking, a ‘lighter’ brain food. And that let’s us see on a bigger scale, to see how to make repair.
We may be saving forests or saving starving children or saving exploited creatures but the initial emphasis is always on a need for urgent repair. Of course, we can't start any big, new initiative without first repairing the damage already done to ourselves. In the business of saving animals we have to get things sorted out, by being vegan at the very least, so that effective personal repair can be made possible.
But ‘repair’ sounds like such a dull and unrewarding business ... until we start to see it as the ‘new creative’. Creativity is perhaps what we need most, since without it our repairs will just be for show. They won’t last and, for vegans, a non-lasting repair is a sort of personal tragedy.
Once you ‘go vegan’ you do it for life. If repairing our own attitudes (concerning the use of animals) slides backwards we’d look foolish and shallow, as if our ideals had simply been wishful thinking or boasting. Once our attitudes shift and in accordance with them we take on being vegan, then there’s no reason, other than weak will, to abandon them and slip back into old primitive ways.