Don’t make them squirm

561: Posted Friday 9th November

If you’re a vegan, have you ever looked inside someone’s fridge and found ‘evidence’, and noticed the look on their face when you shut the fridge door?

This very confronting subject of ours causes embarrassment and worse. They see us looking at them, taking note of things in their kitchen or what’s on their plate (or what they’re wearing), and you have to wonder how does that makes them feel?

The shock when they hit a ‘new awareness’, like realising the connection between ordinary food or clothing and animal cruelty, could be enough to jump-start a radical change in their life, but for most people it doesn’t. It’s likely that their unwillingness could mean they don’t care about the animals involved. Maybe, like almost every human on the planet they don’t care that much because they are too self serving and their concerns too species-specific.

If humans lose their sense of concern and try to forget what humans are doing to the animals, something much bigger is at stake. Once we allow animals to be routinely exploited we downplay the value of innocence itself - of children, of animals, and eventually of the innocence buried within ourselves.

By boycotting animal foods, we can restore much of the guiltlessness of our youth and, at the same time, shift away from anthropocentrism. If humans are in the process of making a major breakthrough in their own consciousness, than this shift is an essential start.

Once we’ve started to make that move in the privacy of our own lives (by becoming more discriminating about what we eat or wear) we might want some encouragement, to keep it up. It is, after all, an unusual thing to do, so we’ll want our friends and family to notice and acknowledge what we’re doing.

Then we wait and wait, and it doesn’t happen. We ask why. We feel resentful. We judge people to be less shockable. less sensitive or sensible, etc. We MUST get some sort of response. And if it doesn’t come spontaneously we might be tempted to force things. Tell them to wake up to the whole sorry background of the food they eat, etc. They listen, amazed. They see us trying to make them feel uncomfortable, and bite back with, “If you want to live uncomfortably yourself, that’s up to you. But why do you want me to live miserably too?” They just refuse to see the point.

Vegans want to dig deeper into the truth. Non-vegans don’t want to.

            Perhaps we think the whole world ought to be on trial. What is happening to ‘food’ animals is enough to make the vegan pessimistic and feel frustrated by people’s level of general unawareness. And so, for the millionth time, we ask ourselves how we might best stop the whole sorry crime against animals?

            I don’t think in the present climate we can stop it yet, not until we look much more carefully at our own approach to others. This will mean us being much more up-front about what is going on inside our own heads, and a re-examination of why we so much need to win our arguments at all costs.

I’m suggesting an entirely different approach to omnivores. Even though it seems to go against the grain, I think we’ll only get somewhere with them when we appreciate the difficulties they find themselves in, when we can find some sympathy for them, for their inability to defend their position, for their ever-growing fear of ill health, for their impotence in contributing towards a more compassionate human species, and of course their utter helplessness in the face of their evident addiction to crap foods, leather footwear and other ‘essential’ animal products. Our intolerance of any or all of this only makes matters worse and entrenches their attitude of turning-a-blind-eye.