1376:
Being vegan means putting up
with people’s misunderstanding of veganism. Vegans seem like ‘refusniks’, as if we’re
resentful and uncooperative, and people who think themselves superior. But that’s not how we see ourselves and it’s
not what we are on about.
A non-vegan friend of mine
mentioned to me the other day that global warming was the biggest issue facing
us, but I said the other big issue threatening the world was the practice of
animal eating. But before I could expand
on my outrageous theory I was stopped. He
‘knew’ what subject I wanted to bring up and he wanted to close down the
discussion. The problem was, he thought
he knew what I was going to say, guessing I’d have no trouble opening up a
whole, deep discussion of certain matters for which he had neither the time nor
the inclination to get into. So I never
got the chance to explain what I had in mind. I wanted to equalise the
argument, certainly not disagree with what he thought but to add another
dimension which he might not have considered before.
It’s not easy to find anyone
to listen to you these days, especially when people get wind of what we are
trying to bring up. But we have to come
to terms with that – it’s perhaps not how we’d like it to be but how it
actually is. We can’t expect others to
have a ‘Eureka moment’ after listening to what we have to say. We can’t even expect them to want to
listen. Their attitude-shift is not
something that’s going to be handed to us on a plate. It will have to be worked for, and without a
bull-in-a-china-shop approach too.
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