Absurd behaviour

578:

Oh, the absurdity! Can you imagine being inspired by money-making and dynasty-building? The by-products of wealth, from which wealth is produced are ‘items’ which we consumers consume. Of course the money making dynasty builders gaze upon us as an adoring parent might. Only their gaze is inspired not by the good they do us but the money they’ll make from us. We consume and we encourage them.

            You can hardly blame the profiteers for taking advantage of us. We’re gullible enough not to notice what’s they’re doing. We’re complaint. We sit through countless TV advertisements and respond in kind to their advertising. We barely listen to anything that might put us off spending our money on the stuff they produce. Via advertising, we are continuously told the pleasant story, which we all know is ‘sales pitch’ and yet we accept it.

            Take the food industry, on which we spend so much of our money, the big selling point here is the emphasis on treats and taste sensation. We are told, “Buy our cheese, buy our biscuits, imagine how happy you would be eating this ‘lobster-dinner-sitting-by-the-lagoon’. They assume we all have a primary, human-centred attitude that animals don’t matter and are here for us to eat.  It’s as if we are meant to have ‘an easy, cool lifestyle’ and to pleasure ourselves in every way possible.

            T.V. advertising ploughs like a tank through roses, past empathy for animals, past the unhealthiness of eating the foods made with them, and arrives at an easy acceptance of animals as merely objects-for-eating. The tackiness of these ads is obvious. They’re tedious and repetitive. But this is TV - all of us put up with ‘the ads’ to get to the entertaining stuff in between. We’re shown hundreds of products every night. And what we see is, more or less, what’s on offer. It’s all we know. We go along with it, we comply and cooperate.

But to a very large extent vegans don’t. We push one whole part of this tacky society aside. We deliberately disassociate from its most commonly shared activity – the cranking of the Animal Industry wheels. As one ingests bits of animals’ body parts, instead of actively boycotting what we would normally disapprove of, we sell our soul to the devil.

            Animal Rights is protest. And even if our protest reaches zero audience it must still be made, if only to bring some sort of hope to those who are still living in the ‘closed world’. Almost all people, whether educated or uneducated, see no way to escape the ugliness of their world. Their attitude is frozen in the grief of being in this mind-prison. “Why bother?”

            A vegan might bother, because he or she might have some optimism, purpose or reason to bother. For us ordinary vegans, we need to focus on ordinary people like us, who might weigh up the situation and decide for themselves, just as we did. As vegans we need to recognise the remarkable talent all humans have, in our ability to adapt and change, to suit each new situation as it comes along. And when the time comes, as it surely will, when change will mean the difference between survival and non-survival, then at that point our choosing will come down to having faith, not in gods but in people.

            Our talent, our enduring optimism and collective self-confidence must be used to teach that pessimism doesn’t exist ... well, that it doesn’t have to exist, anyway.

            Change comes hand in hand with optimism. Change comes from the creative spirit which we all have and which we should be most proud of. Creativity is born out of determination – in this case, to make pessimism disappear simply because it doesn’t need to exist; the reality of optimism is self-created, and the more we can convince others of this the more inclined people will be to listen to what we have to say about veganism.

            By giving up judgement, giving up gossip, giving up blaming, shaming and all the other sad and sour habits humans have, we automatically drop our gloominess of attitude … and thus avoid personal collapse and collective world disaster. Non-judgement lets us pick up on something far better.

The main reason we should drop pessimism is that there’s surely another, more upbeat reason for wanting to live. So, if we can’t get past our gloominess we won’t be able to let our imagination fly. We just won’t see how the process of change will never get a start on, if there isn’t enough imagination and optimism and determination and creativity.