808:
By upping our awareness of the world about us, there’s a
logical progression towards vegan principle. It seems unavoidable. Sensitivity
to beauty ends up with leaving something ugly behind, in order to seek out the
best there is.
What is
more beautiful and innocent than an animal, untouched by the cleverness of the
human brain, uncorrupted by greed, etc? And so it follows that nothing could be
uglier than trying to destroy such a thing of great beauty. This is a familiar
theme of The Vegan Story. It isn’t the stuff of a child’s bedtime fairytale nor
dry facts in a dull tome. It’s a story about discovering something significant
and unexpected. It seems to me that our lives are stories of exploration and
discovery, and they’re sometimes unsafe stories but they move towards resolving
problems by experimenting with the unknown.
Our vegan
story isn’t an entertainment any more than a sacred text is, but it’s likely to
relate to people’s lives and therefore be of universal interest. It’s a story
for telling, but also for scrutinising. And if you and I are tellers of a story
we need to be answerable for it, which is why we don’t need to be seen as
weirdos or fanatics, but simply as conveyors of the story-line and willing to
take on any questions concerning it.
I believe a
good story teller considers the feelings and interests of anyone listening, in
order to capture and hold their attention. It might not be an easy story to
listen to, especially since it requires some little concentration from the
listener, but that’s outweighed by the importance of the story - alongside the
main story theme are the unfamiliar details concerning cover-ups, cruelties and
human frailty. But essentially this is a story about animal farming.
If we want
people to break through all the food myths and health misconceptions, the
details of which can be quite complex, we do need to encourage them to engage
their brains and use some concentration, so that what we have to say can sink
in. The way we tell this story is important. I doubt it can be achieved by a
frowning face and a too-serious tone of voice, because that would warn them of
a heavy lecture. We can’t be light hearted either since we are talking about serious
matters. But, we do need to engage the listener and I think that’s best done by
peppering what we say with questions and by encouraging listeners to ask the
most difficult questions they can think of. Mainly though, we need to find a
way to lighten up so we won’t scare people away.
If you were
walking down the street, approaching a small frightened animal that didn’t know
what this huge approaching human was about to do, mainly you’d want to seem
safe to them. It’s the same with our potentially heavy subject - our approach
as vegans may have to be much more ‘slowly-slowly’. We are, after all, facing
fixed mind-sets. If we can be seen as people who aren’t brittle and who aren’t
insistent, then we’re more likely to be allowed to approach and be given the
go-ahead.
We shouldn’t
use emotional bullying to get people’s attention. We need to come across as
access points for information, and not much more than that.
In the
ideal world we’d surely want people to be approaching us in order to ‘find out’
something. In the real world though, we are in the business of attracting
customers. Let us imagine that we have a ‘For Sale’ sign up in our shop window
- ‘New and Useful Information’. That’s how it should look on our face. People
are invited into our ‘shop’ to see what’s on sale and to pick up what they
want. They wouldn’t put one foot in our shop if we seemed threatening.
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