Reaching across the taboo

1098: 

To attack non-vegans, like calling them ‘meat-heads’, is a mistake. We have to be nicer than that. As animal rights cum greeny standard-bearers, we have to set some standards. It’s a more sophisticated age we live in, where throwing insults around like confetti just makes a lot of mess on the ground, which others have to clear up afterwards.

Approach-wise, we might need a make-over, especially from the image of vegans being attack-dogs. Communication between people of differing viewpoints is always going to be hard, and on this subject, particularly hard. Traditionally, the attack-approach has always worked. It’s easier. It has the advantage of shock. But it’s been done to death. Everyone is used to people suggesting radical paths, using persuasive arguments, and putting the fear of hell into everybody; these people we lump either into the religious-nutters basket or the too hard basket.

Now vegans are usually in one or both, but we still don’t get it. We still say we’re into non-violence and yet we still use the guilt-inducing attack-approach, because we know of no other way to get this controversial subject going. “Stir them up”, we say. And anyway a nice bit of attacking does us good. It gives us a sugar-hit and makes ‘them’ have to step backwards. “Shock them”. But that’s how war works.

So, if we ditch the attack, can we still make a strong enough statement?

As vegan-greenies, we have a fundamental point to make which initially has less to do with animals or food than it has to do with the way this one subject is deeply buried. All difficult subjects are tabooed so we can get on with our lives, but it’s a dangerous ‘deafening’, for it’s in everyone’s interest to break taboos. If we can bring ourselves to tackle difficult subjects, to no longer have to censor what we may or may not say, then ‘animals’ might come to be argued about; on this matter of how our society uses animals, vegans want to let some air into the subject, to find out what people really think, to discuss it to see if there’s anything we can agree on. Our job is to work out ways of releasing the fierce hold this taboo has on otherwise free-thinking people.