Planning for the far future

1039: 

Needless to say, animals are different to us.  With them there’s no hubris, no superiority and they have no doubt about how dangerous humans can be, which is why they always run away from us.  For them the prime danger is that humans always attack them and attack their environment.  Perhaps they know that humans are always trying to improve things for themselves, and with that comes the violence of maintaining their position-of-dominance over Nature, but especially over animals.

The damage we’ve done has come from trying to improve things by wit, strength and ruthlessness.  We’ve never learnt to ‘be content with our lot’.  And now, our manipulation and bullying have brought us to the brink of catastrophe - the worst animal cruelty imaginable, the worst health consequences from eating animals, the worst imaginable environmental damage.  Which is why some of us have decided to tear ourselves away from as many of the destructive habits of our own species and look more closely at the possibility of conducting our lives without exploiting the exploitable.  At least we are making a start, by living a plant-based life.  We’ve begun the process of turning in a different direction to the majority.   It’s hard enough on a personal basis, by changing to a plant diet, let alone convincing the majority of our fellow humans. To swing others around from their omnivorous foods is like steering an ocean liner around, 180 degrees.  There’s so much momentum invested in human interest (what I like, what I want) that to swing the whole ship around might have to be a very slow process.

There has to be a selfless element here; we have to look far ahead, beyond our own lifetime, and set the foundations for and on behalf of future generations. We need to be working on the assumption that eventually people will come to their senses and become peace-loving, responsible and far less me-centred. If and when that fashion takes hold, hopefully the human species will then become unselfconscious warriors of non-violence.

For us here, today, there are problems specific to this very early stage of human transformation, concerning the nature of pro-active peace-making, and that means we, ourselves, must be resolute non-animal users, whilst being dynamic yet not aggressive, non-violent yet still effective.