597:
I think the art of talking about this subject is in looking
a bit vulnerable. I don’t mean deceptively so, just as long as we don’t come
across like a tank in the rose beds or a preacher in the pulpit. Even though we
can’t stand the idea of murdering animals for meat, we have to accept that
there are different points of view about this, and we
ought to know what those views are before countering them. I think the omnivore
thinks something like this:
It
might take a very long time for cruelty to food animals to mean very much when
it’s weighed against food sensation and its instant gratification. The
taste-sensation, the stomach-filling, the crunch and bite and ooze, the salt,
the blood-taste, the sugar-hit – they’re all connected with oral pleasure. It’s
perhaps the most powerful external-internal interface we are familiar with.
It’s not only associated with satisfying hunger and therefore easing the fear
of starvation, but it’s also associated with rich living which eases the fear
of feeling poor and worthless (not even worth feeding). Loving what we love
to eat is not a casual time-passing activity, it’s what stays pretty much
at the forefront of the mind all the time. Just one little twinge of feeling
peckish and there’s a need to satisfy that slightly empty feeling, and indulge
all the choices of taste sensation. Taste buds need appeasing, the body and
mind need calming.
So
giving up any of this instant pleasure would seem like unnecessary
self-punishment. Why would anyone choose to do without what is so available?
And all for the sake of animals? One would have to be crazy or masochistic.
Apart from becoming healthier (and many young people feel immune to ill health)
why would anyone give a plant-based diet even a moment of serious
consideration?
Bearing
all this in mind, I’d suggest that high emotion should give way to
steely determination, and urgency give way to patience if only because the
omnivore is nowhere near ready to be led to our views yet.
Our frustration is a difficulty
for us and yet we might need to get used to the absence of positive feedback,
especially since they probably think we are “crazy
or masochistic”. We need to be like the parent who everyday makes an effort
to provide interesting meals for the family but who does not expect the child
to compliment them on their cooking each day. The kids are fed and grow up well
fed, no more expected, so it’s the same with our ranting and raving about
animals. It sinks in on a subtle level. No need for direct agreement or
approval.
As activists and advocates we
might have to become more mature in order to realise what to expect. It’s
surely about our having a better understanding of the scale of the change we
want to see. To bring people across to our view that animals shouldn’t be
exploited we have to realise it’s a bigger attitudinal change than anything
ever aimed at before.
To recap: animals are slaves and our
aim is to bring that to an end. Angry we might be, but determined activists have
to be in it for the long haul. We don’t need to fly any flags or keep hitting
people with ‘the truth’. Our job isn’t to bore or lecture. We mustn’t go on
about being vegan if that’s just going to inhibit people. We want them to hear
what we say and then go home to consider things we’ve said. We mustn’t make
them feel so uncomfortable that they’ll go home and open the fridge for a
sludgy, creamy, sweet treat to make them feel better … to help them forget us.
When omnivores do agree with us
they’ll often do it in the hope of shutting us up. The more praise they shower
on us (admiring us for the ‘stand’ we’re making) the more they hope to calm us
down only to be rid of us (before we ‘go too far’).
Whether for a good cause or a
selfish one, the more we want admiration the less we’ll get it. When we seem to
impress people by shocking them with the facts, we may not be impressing them
at all. Their seemingly positive feed-back may just be politeness, and people
won’t become vegan out of politeness.
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