The Mental Block

1993:

Prioritising - we see what’s most important, the issues which need special effort, but then there’s the danger of putting off other important issues - omnivores who are environmentalists and working for social justice may decide to put ‘animals’ on the everlasting backburner.

The process of assessing and reassessing priorities may be tedious but it forces us to look deeper, and the deeper we look the more obvious ‘the conspiracy’ seems. We prefer to call it a ‘conspiracy’ since issues, which are deemed not to be in the public interest, can then be down graded by vested interests. They denigrate the ‘bleeding hearts’. They ridicule the ‘lettuce leaf eaters’. That becomes as much part of the promotion game as pushing chicken nuggets. Put it any way you like (wicked 1%’ers crushing the rights of the proletariat), the idea of conspiracy helps make important links - health issues linking to food, linking to the animals, to the environment, to unfair food distribution around the world. The links are obvious enough once you dare to look at them, and each of us are drawn to a particular ‘worst issue’.

If it becomes too much to take on board we need to have an angle on almost all issues, by seeing them as outcomes of the violence within society. By seeing the thread that links so many specific issues, it helps us develop habits that are NOT destructive (not-violent). We set up a train of habits we know we can more or less handle. They’re aimed at our having minimal negative impact on the planet. Eventually we heal our own reputation, we think better of ourselves. Collectively, we then see the human race atoning for what we’ve done to the animals, who are the MOST abused of all our resources and the most damaged part of Nature.