Veganism: inspiring but forgettable

824:

Coming on heavy about the need for everyone to be vegan can put people off for life – if we try to shame them into it or blame them for being so slow with it, we waste our best chance to make an impact. We simply come across as being ‘better-than-you’. And if we blow it here, we also blow it for other activists’ reputation. If we throw caution to the wind, if we’re willing to say anything which might shock, that crude approach will make us easily dismissible.

I suppose the truth is that people do not want to be inconvenienced and therefore try to make us as forgettable as possible. We need to be there and vocal but not so in their face that they want to move away.

If we can open up this subject, on one level what we are saying might be taken in. It might impact and yet not fix. It’s like going to see a highly emotional love story at the movies and then forgetting it as soon as we hit the street, when we plunge back into the real world. People might enjoy being ‘wow-ed’, as we can be at the movies – to be moved, shocked, inspired, carried away, but it isn’t meant to stick. It’s just a story. It’s rare that we can be moved by a ‘universal message’ in it. On that same level most people can see the ideals connected with vegan principle, but that’s a long way from adopting that principle into daily life.

People know that the vegan diet is about food and animals, but that’s as far as it goes. Their own un-interest stops them looking deeper or going further, and if a connection isn’t made to this ‘principle-of-compassion’ then changing one’s present reality doesn’t last. If a change is made, it might turn out to be something that’s regretted later.

Ask yourself this: What would it be like to be vegan? Probably the first thing to spring to mind would be one’s insufficient self discipline, to maintain such a change. And if you’re older, you might also say, “It’s too late to change anyway”.

Whatever about what we say to people, about animal-eating, about rights, nutrition, etc, if it does impact it has to sink in deeply enough to lock in the change, enough to ride over the initial doubts and difficulties of adopting a vegan regime.