606a
The thinking behind veganism hasn’t been faulted up to now.
If there’d been flaws they’d have emerged during the 70 years since the
inception of the idea. If, therefore, the vegan diet is entirely robust, then
the compassion behind it must also be unarguable. Because of this, I associate
vegans with being fearless, and if that is so then vegans can tough it out when
there’s any hostility, when issues concerning ‘using animals’ are raised.
If fear causes war and vegans no
longer have that sort of fear, then our very fearlessness should put a stop to battleground-interactions.
We might feel very alone sometimes but, when tempted to hit out at our
detractors, we should bear in mind that we’re in a strong moral position. We
can open up this taboo subject without using moral pressure, simply by talking
about ‘all this’ as unselfconsciously as it’s possible to seem.
However, before we get there
we’ll have to deal with others’ criticisms, whilst never letting the flak never
become too hard to handle. Our ‘robust principles’ might be dismissed, but I
hope we can still handle rude remarks without shooting ourselves in the foot.
You know how it feels. We’re
having a chat with a friend, and then, ‘BANG’, out of the blue, the atmosphere
changes (and if it feels bad with strangers it’s worse with friends or family).
If you ‘go vegan’, you can expect to touch a raw nerve whenever you tell someone,
“I’m vegan”.
I’ve noticed (probably because
I’m one of those ‘rabid’ vegans) that even good friends are reluctant to get
‘too close to the flame’. They think, given the slightest excuse, I’ll try to
burn them.
We see our omnivore friends thinking
in a sort of panic, and foreseeing the worst, and sensitive to what we might
say that will embarrass them. Soon enough, I’ll steer the conversation
side-ways, to get onto unrelated topics - and then steer the talk around from a
different angle and edge back-in again later. After a restful chat about
something else, I’ll slide back in to what I want to talk about. But is that perhaps
too clever by half?
Here we are, having a nice
unselfconscious chat, but subtle and devious, each attempting to out-manoeuvre
the other.
If we, as vegans, think we’re
pretty crafty when we’re doing the opposite to what’s expected of us, perhaps
we should think again. The omnivore is often smart enough to spot us, having
had practice with other proselytizers.
Assuming, if you do enjoy talking
Animal Rights with people, and assuming you aren’t an animal-bore, and assuming
you still have a few friends left, may I say something corny? These friends
often love us. They love us as we are. They like us, despite ‘our obsession’.
In this society, in our well educated Western communities, people pretty much
know ‘the vegan-type’. They know something (not necessarily accurate) about us,
some of our basic principles; we’re expected to be a sort of moral shock wave.
Often they’re curious to see if they can out-argue us.
For us, we might be keen to get this compassion-revolution
up and running. Amongst fellow activists, whenever we’re discussing serious
matters, it’s almost impossible not to touch on the significance of
‘compassion’. We talk about it together. We talk about it inside our own heads.
In fact we activists are probably walking, talking exuders of concern and
empathy. But there something of a caution felt amongst non-vegans. In an
innocent conversation, once we let on that we’re vegan, once they’ve guessed we’re
steering the conversation towards that tabooed subject, then alarm bells ring. So,
before this happens, I am suggesting that instead of going in hard we do the
very opposite. We underplay it. Why?
Now, I admit this looks very
similar to what we might do when we’re ashamed of something, but of course
that’s not the case here - being vegan is hardly that. But my first instinct is
to tell myself to beware, when telling people “I’m vegan”. As soon as it’s
known, we might have to bite our lip. Sometimes it’s wiser to bide our time and
say far less than we’d like to.
No comments:
Post a Comment