Sunday, December 15, 2013

Dealing with certain preliminaries first

632: 

Vegans who promote Animal Rights need to understand the size of our task. And the manner of it. Many people have already changed, quite radically, over these past 50 years. But alongside, technology has advanced dramatically, so that we now find ourselves living with a younger generation, amongst the Children of the Information Age. If they are discriminating it’s because they have access to more information with which they may ‘discriminate’. Ironically, there’s now too much information and we don’t know what to take notice of; today it isn’t enough for us to simply pass on information to others and expect to wow them with it, today there’s more cynicism and suspicion. So, it comes to this - no one can take in all the new information available, so they choose just the bits they want. We are information-saturated. As communicators of ideas nothing is very straightforward, especially if ‘the idea’ isn’t immediately appealing or if it’s an inconvenient idea like veganism.
            Today, bombarded, softened up by the sheer volume of information being put out, ordinary people are thought to become pliable (or so the vested business interests hope anyway). The Animal Industries, who do so much advertising, aim to install beliefs into the minds of their potential customers, and in doing so shut down individual thinking. They succeed only when people begin to follow the crowd and do as they’re told. Once people have settled into lifestyle food-habits they’re captive. These habits are not much different to any chemical addiction, since most of the addiction to animal products concerns the powerful taste-sensation of them.
            The vegan’s attempt to convince people that they’ve been duped isn’t easy, for why would people believe us? Why would they trust what we say? There’s so much misinformation in circulation today that anything too new, too radical or too inconvenient goes into the too-hard basket of ‘unbelievability’.
In our attempt, we need something special to break through all of that, something all-encompassing. It’s likely that most people will see the vegan diet one-dimensionally; that it is simply good for slimming. Or they’ll see it as good for other self-benefits. But veganism is more than a diet for personal food-advantage. On a deeper level it suggests a wholly different way of thinking.
Everything about being vegan, and everything stemming from it, gets the brain cells moving faster. It lets us see stunning potentials and transformations, and it addresses a lot of allied issues too. Now if, for whatever reason, you’re drawn to it, if you’re receptive to the reasoning behind it, then it’s likely you’re also hearing what vegans are saying about animals and their ‘right to a life’. Whilst not necessarily agreeing with us at first, the thinking-person might be ready to consider giving our arguments a fair hearing. And that will lead to a better understanding of non-violence and all the benefits of that accruing to our own species, let alone other species.
But there will always be those who are most decidedly NOT drawn to this. For them, everything about veganism is either unclear, unbelievable or unattractive. As animal advocates we have wear that. For us it’s probably the hardest part of all, juggling the responsibility of explaining it with the trickiness of dealing with such heavy initial reluctance.

How do we expose the misinformation? How do we get people to believe we’re telling the truth? How do we deal with our own unapproachability? Somehow we have to find our own way to weave a path through this undergrowth, so that we can encourage greater empathy, to get people to think first about the plight of exploited animals before they consider their own convenience.

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