And now that the damage is done ...

802: 

One of the biggest mistakes of our wealthy Western lifestyle is that, in our quest for life-improvement, we’ve let ourselves be seduced by those who push products from the animal food and clothing industry. We give our hard-earned money to Society’s most violent people.

From as early as childhood seduction starts, leading us to believe that we need to improve on what we already have. And somewhere along the line, we fall prey to those who tell us, “We have your best interests at heart”. We start to believe what they tell us, not all of course but what we want to believe. They sell their products proudly, as if they are good for us or at least produced humanely. And we can’t entirely disbelieve them since we can’t accept that they could be lying on such a grand scale. Over the years we follow their advice, and we’re going along just fine, until, in an eleventh-hour realisation, we see what danger we are in, because we’ve let others make our decisions for us, losing the ability to choose for ourselves. To think for ourselves. While clothing is unethical, animal-derived foods are both unethical and dangerous.

By the time we see a crash coming it’s too late. We tot up the amount of flesh we’ve consumed and therefore aren’t surprised that our arteries are clogged. We see how much chocolate cake we’ve consumed and can’t be surprised that we’re overweight. And later, when we’re lying in a hospital bed, we get to wondering how we could have been so stupid to have been so taken in.

It’s possible though that we have seen the light, earlier rather than later. But if we’ve gone with the flow, we’ve also decided not to make any radical dietary changes and certainly NOT speak out about what we’ve realised; we don’t want to be thought too different. It’s also possible that we do learn to change our eating habits, but a certain amount of damage has already been done. We make changes but avoid the most difficult changes. We fear throwing the baby out with the bath water. We fear listening to the dire warnings of busy-body, interfering vegans, for example.

Something fundamental has happened to our receptors. Our trust has been shaken. We look twice at advice; we no longer trust ANY advice - once bitten twice shy. We can’t be sure vegan advice is any different to all that other advice which has been leading us astray for so many years; we lose confidence in our own instincts, so we can no longer discriminate between sense and nonsense.

I think most omnivores, of a certain age, find themselves in this position. They are too cynical, suspicious and habit-ridden to even contemplate making major life-saving changes. They lose control of their decision-making abilities and don’t dare listen to any suggestions that sound even slightly radical.