I’m better than you?

762: 

Self-righteousness is always ugly. Vegans who think they are ‘better than other people’ are deluded. Feeling superior shows-up. Being a vegan, principled, self-disciplined, etc, will never win us popularity, but we don’t need to be devil-may-care about being unpopular. I doubt if what we have to say is threatening, but the way we say it often is; so if omnivores want to dislike us for being ‘up’ ourselves they have every right. We’d do well to down-play the better-than-you image. I’d rather be known for igniting dangerous discussions.

Perhaps, as vegans, we are thought to be radicals, even anti-social. We are open to being misunderstood. If so, we should allow ourselves to be known as confronters but without aggro.

Before I step through your front door, before I enter your living room, before I launch an ethics attack on you, you must be able to trust me, to be sure that I’m not aggressive by nature. I might be confronting but never attacking because, bottom line, I will mostly want to be acceptable to you. You must know that I want you to like me and accept me for who I am. Without that, I can’t expect you to let me in through your door. And if I can’t make any sort of connection with you then I might as well be mute.

This is why I prefer NOT to shock you or drown you out with facts, tempting though it might be in the face of ignorance. I try, instead, to be thought of as a sort of handy-corner-shop-cum-library-conduit for ideas, a vending-information-on-request-machine. From my point of view all these animal issues are very clear, but I have to allow that YOU might not know what’s going on with animals, in which case you can’t be expected to question the animal-food you eat. I start from that basis, until I know otherwise. It’s possible that you DO know but don’t care anyway. But I need to be sure about that before I speak. These are two distinctly different positions that people could be in, and if I don’t know which of these positions applies to you I could be on dangerous ground.

At this point in time it’s relatively early in Society’s Animal Rights consciousness. As an advocate for animal liberation, some caution is needed. I try to restrain myself in order to find out where a person stands. It’s not that I’m embarrassed or ashamed or short on argument. In fact I’m happy to speak freely, as I might on any other social issue. But this particular subject is a ticklish one. Every day we literally eat our words, words which determine our view of animals (especially those used for food and clothing). There’s no other position we hold which is so regularly reinforced by our daily actions, than the food we choose to eat, or not eat. As soon as my position is known, that I don’t use animal-based foods, that immediately sets me up against your position; it’s therefore up to me to convince you that I DON’T think I’m in any way better than you.