A list of enlightenments

747: 

If we are trying to protect the rights of animals we won’t get far by abusing the abusers. They get off on this. As animal activists we need to avoid the temptation to harangue people, to trap them into agreeing with us. You can’t hit people over the head with ‘veganism’. Even if they want to agree with us, they might only want to shut us up. I find the most friendly listeners slip back to old habits after they’ve heard the other side of the story. People aren’t stupid. They value their life, their safety, their lifestyle and their social life with friends. They like eating together. They don’t want to stand out like a sore thumb. Yes, they want to be individual but not too much so. Becoming vegan, especially in a world of so few, seems like one huge soial risk to take.

            So, let’s spell out the many personal and practical implications of being vegan; swapping over to a new type of normality, away from the sort of security one has always known. What does that bring up?

            Comfort comes from clothing, social interactions, tasty food,  self esteem - ah, but self-esteem is fragile.

Self esteem is eroded by the guilt of being involved in a system we can’t approve of.  On the one hand we value our having greater sensitivity but on the other we try to meet the demands of comfort. It comes down to the value we place on having a clear conscience as opposed to pain of having a guilty conscience.

Today we are being made to feel guilty about so many things, anything from smoking tobacco (self-induced harm) to being wasteful and polluting. We clean up some habits, we start to recycle, we buy ‘green’ and we try to conserve energy. To allow in any more guilts, like those concerning the exploiting of animals, seems too ambitious. We say, “Maybe let that guilt alone”. And quietly (no one is screaming at us about this one) we let it fester. And who knows how that eventually affects us.

            I would suggest that this is the next layer of guilt we can strip away to feel really much better about ourselves. We can’t fix up just one of the ‘guilts’ before moving onto the next. They need to be dealt with simultaneously. This ‘clean-up’ is a multi-task.

By gradually raising awareness of each habit and seeing how it affects us (our own lives and the planet’s) we can repair the damage incrementally.

All I would say is this, that to totally ignore animal issues would mean we are so afraid of addressing this subject that it will spoil all the other improvements. You can feel advanced in one important way but retarded in another. If you know any enlightened people, try asking them what they eat. Unless they’ve addressed this animal-slavery issue, you’re likely to see imbalance in that person.