Saving Our Souls

1007: 

Violence would have been dropped long ago if humans were less competitive and less quarrelsome.  We each want to get to the top of the heap, or at least prevent being pushed further towards the bottom.  Progress is measured by upward 'advancement';  e.g.  human animal rising to the top of the animal kingdom, becoming the dominant species.  But in our quest to rise, we’ve found ourselves submerged in so much destructive behaviour that we should look again at what we really mean by 'progress'.

Humans are now at a stage of reassessing priorities.  We’re beginning to realise that winning isn’t necessarily gaining.  Our thirst for war and our need to practise domination over animals seems to have been our undoing.  On a personal level, shame and failure has crept up on us quietly.  We've hardly noticed it.  But when evidence of ill health, weak ethics and planetary damage becomes too obvious to ignore, we have to.

I’d suggest that if we hadn’t been so hooked on 'yummy' animal-based foods and all the other little comforts associated with products from abattoirs, we wouldn’t be in such a mess now.  We wouldn’t now have to face up to reducing our carbon footprint or ending mass starvation or fighting obesity or struggling with the shortage of clean water!  Plant-based eating would never have brought us to any of these crisis points.

Whether in the form of making war or taking what we don’t need, it’s been humans' short-term, short-sighted approach that’s been our undoing.   Our quick fix habits have been self-centred and anthropocentric.   Hardly ever have habits been based on empathy and altruism.  The characteristic advances that humans have made have been based on the premise that we must 'leave others to rot'.  Our irrepressible desires and decadent lifestyles are dependent upon exploiting the most accessible resources.  The most valuable and vulnerable of  these 'accessible resources' are - animals.

           

If we do eventually save our world (saving our own souls at the same time) it might just be in the nick of time.  The great fear is that we are already at the eleventh hour.  If we have left our run too late, we won’t know until it IS too late.  So perhaps we need to act sooner rather than later.  The choice is ours, but we can’t move on until the most obvious damage is repaired.  To make a start, we can GO VEGAN - NOW! and start to reverse the damage we’ve set in motion.  The longer we leave it the more damage will be done and the more we'll have to repair.

Ed: CJ