Rebel’s view of things

1276: y

Vegans have to be changers and rebels all at the same time.  We have to be fearless, since we are fighting against a HUGE popular mind set.  Many vegans have only ever known people who follow the traditional ‘truths’.  And before we became vegan ourselves, we  might have been content to go along with the popular 'truths' concerning diet, nutrition and eating habits.  Conforming allows one to be acceptable, and although there might have been a niggling concern about farm animals, one's choices of food never altered much at all, never questioning the authority of doctors and nutritionists.  But today, everything is up for grabs.

With so much more information at hand, there’s a lot to rebel against, and a lot to discover, as to why so much conventional knowledge is faulty.  Perhaps vegans are in the best position to see why it’s faulty, since so much is predicated on the ‘immovable essential’ that we must continue with our animal dependency.  Take away the animal element and we miss out on a vast amount of luxury product.

To boycott animal products, because they are in every way damaging to ourselves, to turn the popular myth on its head, that will be difficult.  It might take a long time to explode the myth.  After all, humans have been convinced of the ‘essentiality’ of eating or using animals for a very long time.  But if our main aim is to make our species better (in all senses of the word) the work involved will need the right fuel, otherwise we’ll run out of energy too soon or fall prey to deadly diseases.

For energy and health we need good food.  But we need other fuels too, that are self generated and are made by and used for a robust mental state.  You might call it ‘strength of character’, but whatever its name, it needs to be on tap.  So that when we ‘see’ something better we can simply drop the energy-draining habit and replace it with a better one.  We have to prove to ourselves that we’re not intimidated by anything as trivial as missing our favourite foods or missing-out on being just-like-others.

As we slough off our old conformist skin, we can see better the connections between various big issues.  For example: animal eaters connect to the cruelty of the animals’ living conditions; their rearing connects to the overproduction of carbon emissions; the production of animal protein uses crops which could be sustaining life amongst the poor and hungry.  To ignore all these connections one must either be unaware of them OR be ruled by self indulgence and an almost total lack of empathy.