Not Being Too Obvious

1959:

It’s understandable, with pessimism being in vogue, that we’re beating ourselves up, with shame and guilt about the mess we’re in and our inability to clean it up. Personal shame is all turned inwards. We force ourselves to forget about some of the trickier world issues, because if we can’t get a clear run at major global problems we give up on them. We think we are too insignificant, and they are too complicated. We give up trying to ‘run’ at them at all. And since we believe everything is out of our control anyway, why go to all the inconvenience of taking on a vegan lifestyle in the first place?

         

Animal consumers are practising members of an animal-abusing society. The Kill-Club is everywhere on the planet and most people are umbilically linked to it, so we feed the very problems we’re aiming to solve, because so many world problems trace their origins back to animal exploitation.

Once we can see the part we play in all this and want to do something about it, we may feel as though we’re on the move. But often we decide to pull back by only going half way – eaters of red meat switch to eating chicken and fish, the vegetarians stop at another point. Neither gets close enough to the problem to be an effective advocate for the animals. Vegans, however, can be effective advocates. But when no one notices us or even if they make fun of us, we tend to go on the defensive. Or we attempt to pre-empt that by showing off, by telling everyone what we’ve done and why they should too.

Inevitably we get a bad reaction, which surprises and disappoints us. Then we get angry (obviously frustrated because no one’s paying attention). Then we go for broke, with anger, invective. Finally, we disassociate. We give up on the wretched animal-abusers. But still, nothing really changes.

         

Nothing can change if we are focusing on the wrongs of ‘animal-attack’ when we then use another sort of attack on those who disagree with us. Perhaps we shouldn’t be phased at all by disagreement, for at least we’ve stimulated opinion.

If we don’t come across as unlikeable, when we’re faced with disagreement, then it’s more likely something of what we are saying will sink in, be it ever so subliminally.