Tuesday, October 23, 2012

No insistence


544:

By upping awareness of the world about us, there’s a logical progression that inevitably ends up at vegan principle. It seems unavoidable. Sensitivity to beauty ends up with leaving something ugly behind in order to seek out the best there is. What is more beautiful and innocent than an animal, untouched by the cleverness of the human brain, uncorrupted by greed, etc, and so it follows that nothing could be uglier than trying to destroy the thing of greatest beauty. This is a familiar theme of stories. It isn’t the stuff of a child’s bedtime fairytale and it isn’t dry facts in a dull tome. It’s a story about discovering something significant and unexpected. It seems to me that our lives are stories of exploration and discovery, and they’re sometimes unsafe stories but they move towards resolving problems by experimenting with the unknown.
            Our vegan story isn’t an entertainment any more than a sacred text is, but it’s likely to relate to people’s lives and therefore be of universal interest. It’s a story for telling but also for scrutinising. And if you and I are tellers of a story we need to be answerable for it, which is why we don’t need to be seen as weirdos or fanatics, but simply as conveyors of the story-line.
            I believe a good story teller considers the feelings and interests of anyone listening in order to capture their attention. It might not be an easy story to listen to, so it requires some little concentration from the listener, because there are unfamiliar details concerning cover-ups, cruelties and human frailty. But essentially it’s all about animal farming.
            If we want people to break through all the food myths and health misconceptions, the details of which can be quite complex, we do need to engender a certain level of concentration, so that what we have to say can sink in.
            How can that be achieved?
            Certainly, the frowning face and serious tone of voice will achieve nothing. We need to engage the listener. We need to lighten up so we don’t scare people away.
            If you were walking down the street, approaching a small frightened animal that didn’t know what this huge approaching object was, mainly you’d want to seem safe to them. Our approach as vegans may have to be much more ‘slowly-slowly’. We are, after all, facing fixed mind-sets. If we can be seen as people who aren’t brittle and who aren’t insistent, then we’re more likely to be allowed to approach.
            There’s no place for emotional bullying to get people’s attention. We need to come across as access points for information, and not much more than that.
            In the ideal world we’d surely want people to be approaching us, in order to ‘find out’. In the real world though we are in the business of attracting customers. Let us imagine that we have a ‘For Sale’ sign up in our shop window - ‘New and Useful Information’. That’s how it should look on our face. People are invited into our ‘shop’ to see what’s on sale and to pick up what they want. They wouldn’t put one foot in our shop if we seemed threatening.

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