Absurd behaviour

840:

Oh, the absurdity! Can you imagine being inspired by money-making and dynasty-building? The products which make wealth for some are the ‘items’ consumers consume. Of course, dynasty builders gaze upon us like adoring parent do, only their gaze is inspired not by love but by money.  We consume and we encourage them with the money they’ll make from us.

            You can hardly blame the profiteers for taking advantage of us, if we’re gullible enough not to notice what they’re doing. We’re complaint. We sit through countless TV advertisements and respond appropriately. Via advertising, we are continuously ‘sales pitched’, and yet we go along with it.

            Take the food industry, on which we spend so much of our money. The big selling point here is the emphasis on treats and taste sensation. We are told, “Buy our cheese, buy our biscuits, imagine how much you will enjoy them”. By a process of mutual back-scratching the travel industry uses food to sell both, “Imagine how happy you would be eating this lobster-dinner while you are sitting by this lagoon on Paradise Island”.

Advertisers assume we are so human-centred that animals don’t matter. On ‘Paradise Island’ any possible creature is simply here for us to eat. We imitate the potentates with our longing for and pretending to have ‘an easy, cool lifestyle’. We aim to pleasure ourselves in every way possible.

            T.V. advertising ploughs like a tank through roses, past good sense, past affordability, past empathy for animals, past the unhealthiness of eating rich foods, and arrives at an easy acceptance of animals as merely objects-for-enjoyment. The tackiness of these ads is obvious. They’re tedious and repetitive. But this is TV - all of us put up with ‘the ads’ in order to get to the entertaining stuff we really want to watch. We’re shown hundreds of products every night. And what we see is, more or less, what’s on offer. We go along with it. We comply and cooperate.

But, largely, vegans don’t. We push one whole part of this tacky society aside. We deliberately disassociate from its most commonly shared activity – the cranking of the Animal Industry wheels. The non-discriminating omnivore ingests bits of animals’ body parts. They aren’t into actively boycotting what they might disapprove of. In effect, they sell their soul to the devil.

            Animal Rights is a fundamental protest. And even if our protest reaches zero audience, it must still be made, if only to bring some sort of hope to those who are still living within the ‘closed world’.

Almost all people, whether educated or uneducated, see no way to escape the ugliness of their world. Their attitude is frozen in the grief of being locked into the conformity of a mind-prison. They say, “Why bother?”

            A vegan bothers because he or she might have some reason to bother. We have some optimism and a whole lot of purpose. And that means we feel a whole lot better about our lives than most others and want others, ordinary people like us, to weigh up the situation and decide for themselves, just as we did.

As vegans, we need to recognise the remarkable talent all humans have, in our ability to adapt and change, to suit each new situation as it comes along. And when the time comes, as it surely will (when change will mean the difference between survival and non-survival), then, at that point, our choosing will come down to having faith, not in gods but in people.

            Our enduring optimism must merge with a collective self-confidence, to teach just one thing: that pessimism doesn’t need to exist. To convince others of this we need to emphasise that change can only come about by way of optimism, from the creative spirit within us all.

 Creativity is born out of determination – in this case, to deconstruct pessimism. The more often we say this the sooner people will start to listen to what we have to say about veganism.

            By giving up our wholly unnecessary value judgements of one another, by giving up gossip, by giving up blame and shame, along with all the other sad and sour habits we humans indulge in, we automatically look forward. By dropping our gloominess of attitude, we avoid personal collapse and therefore stop hurtling towards collective world disaster. Non-judgement lets us pick up on something far better.

The main reason we should drop pessimism is that there’s surely another, more upbeat reason for wanting to live. So, if we can’t get past our gloominess we won’t be able to let our imagination fly into optimism and determination and creativity.