Big shiftings

592:

If adults go astray they lead their kids astray with them. With ten or twenty years of indoctrination, young people are hard pressed to adopt a truly compassionate personality ... and yet many do. An instinct in some young people tells them that their fellow humans could be wrong about some of the most fundamental things, like resorting to warfare to solve differences, like accepting violence done to animals for the sake of food.

The problem, as I see it, is that humans develop and entrench certain habits and then forget ever to question them. Young people, however, have a chance to make changes when they first move away from their parents’ dining table. But this is a time when they probably need most help, to give them enough confidence to change and set in new eating habits. They need practical advice on how to change to a plant-based diet.

For most others, they give up before they’ve started. They pass the stage of even considering a new ‘food’ idea, because there are too many normalities and addictive habits to forego. They won’t be able to take the idea of veganism seriously because it will change their whole life style.

Some young people (and even a few older ones) on the other hand, will rise to the challenge, and that’s where radical change can take place. In reality, if left too long, once a person decides to ‘settle down’ it might be too late; past a certain age, unless we’ve made our move early, it’s unlikely our ‘habit-self’ will allow us to go vegetarian let alone vegan.

How great is the gulf, then, between practising vegans and ‘non-vegans’? Probably enough to need a fundamental attitude change necessary, and for that maybe (in order to hit the ground running) one would need to be about two years old, not chronologically but in a person’s freshness of approach at the taking-up-of-new-ideas.