Standing upright in a ‘me-first’ world

459:

When we look into the ‘me-first’ world, obviously food features large. When it comes to food we are largely controlled by it. Maybe our food habits haven’t been changed since childhood? It might never have occurred to us to change them.
Maybe one day it hits you. It did me, but I wasn’t ready, so I turned away. Or maybe I was nearly ready and I did change, but not enough. But eventually I did the thing properly, went ‘vegan’, sacrificing some of my ‘me-first’ for ‘me-second’. I never looked back. What exactly impels one to take this plunge is different for everyone. It’s a ‘coming-out’, a breaking-through.
Once you do go vegan and feel okay about it, things do move on quickly. Once the food change-over is established and it feels comfortable then maybe comes the time to move on a little further, to a veganism not only food-oriented but to one which affects much more of our daily behaviour, especially when we feel like getting involved in activism. Then the question arises as to how we conduct this ‘advocacy for animals’. Will our activism be inspired by complete non-violence or be driven by force and all the techniques of heavy persuasion?
For me there seemed such an obvious urgency. I wanted others to change my way, and that drove my activism, until I started to consider how effective I was being. I thought that if our food was non-violent so should our thoughts be and so should our attempts at persuading others. I thought - how can vegans be useful to our non-violent animal friends if we aren’t advocating and practising non-violence like them. I like to think that animals aren’t corrupted in the ways we humans are and therefore they live in a state of peace and harmlessness, a superior state of mind we could all aspire to.
It’s quite a challenge to routinely practise non-violence in this violent world. If we don’t attempt to be non-violent in our approach to others then our self-esteem will surely suffer. And we won’t do much good for the animals who we are supposed to be standing up for. Who will identify with an angry activist who is trying to advocate for peace? People are more likely to follow our example of using ‘peaceful food’ if we’re peaceful people.