Passionate and anonymous

1456: 

Seeming to be good doesn’t guarantee anything much at all, least of all our being liked.  If we go around displaying lots of ‘goodness’ at every conceivable opportunity, it either looks like narcissism or bragging, and then we’re someone to be avoided.  We might think we're showing passion, but to others it seems like something rather different.

At the other extreme there’s a person with genuine humility, who looks a lot better but is perhaps a bit ineffectual.  The proof of the pudding is in the eating, of course.  So, in the end it’s the depth of our commitment to 'being good' which is our true test.  And nothing guarantees this better than doing what we do as anonymously as possible.  

Logically, you might think passion could go hand in hand with a more antagonistic, direct approach.  For most animal advocates it all starts with passion, linking some unlikely emotions like outrage, compassion, sensitivity and hatred, but that's when passion gets to be a confusion of emotions.  On the one hand our passion is great but if there’s a hard edge to it isn’t understood or it’s just plain unattractive.

Passion can be strong, and expressing it can be loud; we can’t help being proud of our position, as vegans and animal advocates. And it's very difficult to avoid taking the moral high ground, because defending voiceless animals is to speak up for them from a moral standpoint.  But then we get over confident, even confronting. In the end it boils down to guarding against being perceived as ‘up’ our selves. Perhaps we need to keep ourselves out of the picture as far as possible and that way our motives can’t be called into question.

If we can establish respect for who we are and for the way we express our passion, without getting too full of ourselves, we might just win an acceptance of who we are and what we stand for.