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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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