Don’t make them squirm

822: 

If you’re a vegan, have you ever looked inside someone’s fridge and found ‘evidence’, and noticed the look on their face when you shut the fridge door?

This very confronting subject of ours causes embarrassment and worse. They see us looking at them, taking note of things in their kitchen or what’s on their plate (or what they’re wearing), and you have to wonder how this makes them feel.

The shock comes when they are made to realise the connection between ordinary food or clothing and animal cruelty – for us vegans, we might think that this could be enough to jump-start a radical change in their life. But for most people it doesn’t. Does this mean they don’t care about the animals involved? Maybe, but like almost every human on the planet, they don’t care that much. They might be too self serving. Their concerns might be too species-specific.

If humans lose their sense of concern and try to forget what humans are doing to innocent animals which are used for food, then I’d say that there’s something much bigger at stake. Once we allow animals to be routinely exploited, we downplay the value of innocence itself – whether of children, of animals, or eventually of the innocence buried within ourselves.

By boycotting animal foods, we can restore much of the guiltlessness of our youth and, at the same time, shift away from anthropocentrism. If humans are in the process of making a major breakthrough in their own consciousness, then this single awareness-shift is an essential start.

Once we’ve started to make that move, in the privacy of our own lives (by becoming more discriminating about what we eat or wear), where do we go from there? It’s a big step away from majority behaviour, so we might need some encouragement, to keep it up. It is, after all, an unusual thing to do, so we’ll want our friends and family to notice and acknowledge what we’re doing.

Then we wait and wait, and it doesn’t happen. We ask why. We feel resentful. We judge people to be un-shockable, insensitive or too pragmatic, etc. We demand some sort of response, and if it doesn’t come spontaneously then we might be tempted to force it out of people. We decide to tell them to wake up to the whole sorry background of the food they eat, etc. They listen, amazed. They see us trying to make them feel uncomfortable, and bite back with, “If you want to live uncomfortably yourself, that’s up to you. But why do you want me to live miserably too?” They just refuse to see the point.

Vegans want to dig deeper into the truth. Non-vegans don’t want to.

            Perhaps we think the whole world ought to be on trial. What’s happening to ‘food’ animals is enough to make anyone feel pessimistic. I often feel both surprised and disappointed by people’s level of general unawareness. And so, for the millionth time, I ask myself what can be done to stop the whole sorry crime against animals? But then I think that, in the present climate, it won’t be stopped, not until we look much more carefully at our own approach to other people. All that pent up anger has to be dissolved first, and that will mean me being much more up-front about what is going on inside my own head. First, I need to re-examine why I so much need to win arguments, at all costs. In that respect, I’m suggesting an entirely different approach to the omnivore; even though it seems to go against the grain, I think we’ll only get somewhere with them when we appreciate the difficulties they find themselves in. It has to start with myself finding some sympathy for them, for their inability to defend their position, for their ever-growing fear of ill health, for their impotence in contributing towards a more compassionate human species. And, of course, I need to empathise with their utter helplessness in the face of their evident addiction to crap foods, leather footwear and all sorts of other ‘essential’ animal products. If I show intolerance of any or all of this, it only makes matters worse and entrenches their habit of turning-a-blind-eye.