Hammering in the Nails

1581: 

Edited by CJ Tointon

Are we fighters for the future or slaves of the past? Are we builders of consciousness or are we trying to numb it? Are we open-mouthed fledglings, waiting to be fed, or are we discriminators, refusing what isn't good for us? As adults, we can determine our own destinies. We don't have to do as we're told or swallow what others want us to swallow (and I do mean 'swallow' literally). Most people do it many times a day, every day - swallow the body parts and secretions of farmed animals! For those who don't indulge, the very idea is disgusting. 

I ask myself why people are submitting to these death-foods; allowing themselves to yield to the wishes of the advertisers? Why can’t even the most intelligent consumer be persuaded to leave it all behind? Perhaps they don't realise how easily they're being manipulated, or how sophisticated the food industry's persuasion machine is. Perhaps some people want to be led, allowing the machine to do the job of thinking for them. If they do, there's a great danger of them losing concern about the origins of the animal-based foods they buy.  Like fledglings in the nest, consumers lie in wait, ready to be nourished, but only eating what 'they' want them to eat. 

We earn our money and spend much of it on rubbish food, without thinking, without discriminating. It's as if we adults are almost rushing to lose our acuity; just as sex-driven teenagers rush to lose their virginity. In forfeiting the use of our fine minds and sharp senses, we settle for any old pleasure experience that's on offer. Instead of opening doors to consciousness, we close them, with the excuse: "Everybody else does it, why shouldn't I?" Being seduced by the feeling of 'safety in numbers', makes us comply too easily. We just 'go along with the crowd'. Even when we're swimming against the tide of the coming age, we know we're still in step with the march of the day. 

For those of us not so easily seduced, we may have jumped ahead already, changed direction, disassociated ourselves from the crowd. Understandably, any such 'unauthorised change' is a threat to manufacturers of animal-derived foods. Perhaps they already fear the coming age, realising that it might be 'VEGAN' in nature, more expansive, far less violent and heading towards a greater consumer awareness. 

Today, this 'expansive awareness' might still seem a million miles away. The vast majority of people are still poisoning themselves by eating the corpses of animals. Bearing the weight of huge bodies and double standards. And they're still largely unaware of the danger of their diets. Vegan food doesn’t eradicate this entirely, but it helps to dissolve the 'lump' of it. It helps to break down the mindset that we need to eat meat for strength, that we can kill animals without repercussion, or that we can deaden our own fears by complying with the norm.

By becoming vegan, we turn all that around - or at least we become more alert to other possibilities. We can even wake the rebel in ourselves and aim to bring about change; since the rebel stands up to Authority by asking some of the tricky questions that others won't ask. If we let the rebel in us remain sleeping, we allow these frightening people to continue controlling us. If we aren't sapping their strength by boycotting their commodities (animal-derived foods and clothing) then we’re actively helping to boost their spirits. When we open our purse or wallet for them, we also open our hearts to them. We do it by pretending we aren’t aware. We tip them the wink, we turn a blind eye and we downplay our own involvement in their grubby business. By going along with them, we give away our rights to an honest life and in effect, embrace our own early (and probably painful) deaths. We build our own coffins and let our dollars hammer down the nails of the lids.