Motivation

1308: 

If you’re the sort of vegan who doesn’t particularly want to speak out, but just wants to be accepted for your views, then that’s fine.  But there are others of us who are the sorts of vegans who want to educate the ubiquitous omnivore, and who want others to recognise us for what we stand for.  And to our everlasting frustrations, that is one hard ask.  Usually people’s reactions to veganism are neither logical nor kind, nor for that matter particularly unkind. We’re as much up against indifference as hostility.  We often get the impression that people want to be left alone, when they say, “What’s important for you is not important for me”.

On some level we must accept that.  For them this whole subject is not worth talking about or responding to.  This might be irritating to any vegan who sees this subject as vitally and universally important; but the fact is that what is so future-making for us is, for others it's not even worth noticing.

So, if amongst our contemporaries there’s no kudos in our being vegan, how do we stop the frustration or rather, where do we find encouragement?  Perhaps from within, from acknowledging that the rest of the world hasn’t yet seen what we’ve seen, and that the real catastrophe of our age is simply a crisis of unimaginativeness.

There’s no point getting angry about it.  If encouragement isn’t forthcoming from others, that won’t deter us from remaining vegan, because we know something of the truth of things, which others simply don’t know or can’t see; nor do they project the consequences of their not seeing.  As vegans, we know that we aren’t dependent on encouragement to stay vegan.  Nor do we say what the omnivores say - “If others eat animals so can I eat animals.  If others don’t question it neither do I need to”.

Vegans know that without some robust, solo, inner questioning, things will stay the same.  If we lead the way, we can only expect to keep hitting a few crisis points in our own motivation, since it goes with the territory.