Rushing To The Rescue

1979:

Obviously boycotting animal products isn't easy, especially at first. Our addiction to many products on the market is entrenched. And yet we know, as a species, we're highly adaptive and that particular change isn't really as hard as we might think.

Vegans, already over their cravings and are activist-inclined, want to be rushing to the rescue - we have big ideals to be realised. We know this will mean making a big statement, to be clear that as a vegan you really are in it for the long haul. Then, we can back up our words.

What is it that the idealist is most up against? Perhaps in our  case it’s the majority attitude of pitilessness; the lives of domesticated animals are as important as our own. We can only show this  by making certain, personal lifestyle changes, to show solidarity with them. Hopefully it will lift us up to be kinder,  'greener', and irreconcilably vegan. But this 'vegan' thing, even if it weren't focused on animals or human health, it would still be the most logical and intelligent way to go.

By being vegan, we are, to some extent, in a state of self control over our food habits. That in itself is empowering. But there’s the pay-back too, in the food itself; highly energising plant food is an aid to thinking, it’s a ‘lighter’ brain food. And that let’s us see what most needs repair.

We may be saving forests or saving starving children or saving exploited creatures, but the initial emphasis is always on a need for urgent repair. Of course, we can't start any big, new initiative without first repairing the damage already done to ourselves. In the business of saving animals, we have to do first-things first. Be vegan at the very least, so that effective personal repair can be made possible, before advocating repair to others.

But ‘repair’ sounds like such a dull and unrewarding business. That is, until we see it as the ‘new creative’. Creativity is perhaps what we need most, since without it our repairs will just be for show. They won’t catch on. They won’t last.

Once you ‘go vegan’, you do it for life. If repairing our own attitudes (concerning the use of animals) slides backwards, wouldn’t we feel foolish and shallow? It would be as if our ideals had simply been wishful thinking or boasting.

Once our attitudes shift and become vegan, then there’s no reason to abandon ship, and return to the old, primitive ways.