The power of nostalgia

1154:

 

I’m in England, watching the waddling masses making for their favourite cafes, to eat their beloved chips with everything.  But it’s holiday time here.  A special time where all waddlers can indulge in nostalgia, and foodwise there’s nothing as popular as fish and chips.  Here, by the south coast, in summer sunshine, the waddlers and their troops of waddling children, their large girths filling out their steel chairs, eating from buckets and cartons, and all washed down with Coke.  But these are free people who’re on holiday, with money in their pockets.  They’re buying the kids a few treats, and the kids are asking for holiday food, like fish and chips.  They’re all on holiday, enjoying the sea air, smelling the sea and frying chips and crunchy battered fish.  How can they ever NOT want to repeat this pleasure, over and over again? Imagine the disappointed children being made to give all this away, on account of an ethical decision to protest against cruelty-to-fish.  Cruelty?  What cruelty?

No one wants to know about what happens on decks of fishing boats, because they don’t want a reason to give up this instant nostalgia buzz. For fish-and-chip lovers, returning to childhood memories of the beach and that smell of sea weed, mixed with the vinegary chips and battered fish - this is such an ideal.  It’s our reward for holding our position in the animal domination-league.

Being humans, we have certain pleasures available to us.  Being human we are able to make choices.  And this is the mighty, free-willed human we’re talking about here.  This is the over-eater and habitual spender, who makes up the vast majority of people on the planet.

This free-willed human may be obstinate and perhaps even arrogant, selfish and thoughtless. But they’re just doing what they’ve always done and what everyone else does. They’re all customers of the Animal Industries. It’s likely they’ve invested so much in one lifestyle that they’ve had to build a strong resistance to our arguments.

To all intents and purposes, I’m referring to just about everyone. And yet these ‘every-persons’ are not hard hearted, nor bloodthirsty, nor even implacably anti-vegan. It’s just that they’re attracted and often addicted to many yummy foods, like fish and chips, which just so happen to be animal products. The last thing on Earth they want is to give them up and never return to them.

Consequently they badly want to hear NOTHING of what we’ve got to say.  In their mind we’re to be shunned, boycotted and ignored.  In the same way we don’t want to be around them.  We boycott so much of the food they eat, and their dinner parties and various other social eat-together events: they boycott us and we boycott them, in effect.  It amounts to a lot of separation.

That’s why vegans have their work cut out.  We need to work out ways to prove the vegan diet is so much better, and then do all we can to reverse this separation problem.