Growth by Theatre

536:

“Welcome to Cloud Cuckoo Land”. Could a society of herbivores ever exist? “Ya gotta be dreaming”, and yet …

Today none of us has any excuse for doing nothing; vegans strike out and hope to draw others along with them. ‘Going vegan’ is still an unusual thing to do, but I doubt it will always be that way because the idea will eventually be irresistible. We can take our cue from the Theatre – what we say might be somewhat confronting but what we say is probably interesting enough to hold people’s attention.

Lights dim, the audience is seated and they’re ready to see something new. Disbelief is suspended when new ideas are introduced. And who knows, we might even make them laugh when the joke is on them, they having come to see what we have to say, even though it seems at first quite preposterous.

We speak about non-violence and how great changes can come about by one small shift of attitude - that violence is NOT necessary, which means killing or keeping animals is not necessary. But realising this might be a slow process, which is why we need to present our ideas in the form of Theatre. Our radical ideas must be drip-fed into the general consciousness, a little like the slow power of water’s attrition making small indentations in hard rock, eventually gouging valleys to clear a path for water to flow down to the sea.

Slowly we have to wear down opposition to violence, first with plant-based diets (which ends animal exploitation), then with the idea of consistency, where sensitivity no longer sits comfortably with inconsistency - where turning a blind eye to one thing becomes impossible the more we open our eyes in other directions.