Passionate talk

1543: 

If vegan activists are in the business of talking about animals, it might be a great personal challenge, eventually becoming a main reason-to-be.  It involves our diet, our conscience, our very intelligence, but not least it allows us to talk about matters of great importance and relevance to the future.

The whole Animal Rights thing has to be one of the greatest challenges we face, whether we’re struggling to change our own eating habits or struggling to get the vegan message across.  Unless we can deal with these struggles and find them meaningful, we’ll never be able to get anywhere with people who are still largely oblivious to it.  That in itself will be a great source of frustration for us.

The subject is broad, its implications touch every branch of life, if only because the human condition is always darkened by that one terrible habit so many have - resorting to violence to solve our problems.  There’s hardly anything we do (that involves others) that is not in some way improved by considering violence.  Even in mild cases, we can find ourselves using some sort of force to bring about the outcome which will be to our own benefit. But the 'drug' wears off, and we find that the solutions (that we thought we had) evaporate, leaving us back where we started.

If we try to make Animal Rights/Veganism just an ethics or health issue we sell it cheap.  It IS that, but so much more.  It gives us peace-of-mind, opens up our compassionate instincts, and brings us to daily actions which harmonise with our very soul.  Now, if you find that a bit hard to swallow, then you might settle for something a little less grandiose.  Perhaps it’s just more interesting to be a vegan. The principle of non-violence offers solutions that are inaccessible to those who are still eating violence-based animal foods, or make use of abused animals in any other way.  And these solutions start out as discussions about the strengths of non-violence, as they pertain to ethics and the reform of the human condition.  But they go on to effect our attitudes towards nutrition and therefore health, towards the environment, and lots more.  By simply being vegan, many optimistic possibilities open up to us.  Our thoughts can fly free, our considerations broaden and our conversations become so much more meaningful than discussing house prices.  Once we can consider a life without the enslaving and killing of animals for food and clothing, a whole range of possibilities tumble out of the clouds like rain.  One's only regret might be that none of these possibilities were understood earlier, whilst one was still an eater and user of our animal slaves.