Debating vegan principle

76:

Why am I so keen to talk about Animal Rights, to alter attitudes and change habits? I like to think it’s a wish to implant a sense of optimism in others - “Go Vegan and Save the Planet”?

            I see potential in vegan principle andI’m busting to talk about it ... but sadly I find no one wants to know. I’m cold-shouldered. Everything is thrown at me to either shut me up or bring me back into the fold. The majority of people are suspicious of us ‘minority types’, saying that we are deluded or even less sincere than we seem. I speak often enough about kindness to animals but maybe I’m not so kindly disposed towards people. 

            Whether that’s true or not, the rejection I often feel makes me try all the harder to come across as a sincere person. And ultimately that’s not such a bad thing. I might need to learn the hard way, that this comes down to not having any ulterior motives. And this is central to my eventual effectiveness.  

Promoting vegan

75:

This is what I wanted to do: establish a vegan lifestyle, and when that was all  in place I wanted to get political. I was urgent to speed things up on the Animal Rights front. I wanted to start a small revolution in my own corner of the world and then see it spread. I wanted to go from a wannabe-vegan to vegan-warrior, ready to take on the world. And yet ... this isn’t reality, is it?       

            However passionate I am, I should bear in mind that I’m not a seasoned politician with a tough exterior, ready to rip into adversaries. I’m just an ordinary person who may be talking to other ordinary people. And what of my ‘adversaries’? I mustn’t forget they’re sensitive free-willed beings too. They will decide things for themselves, no matter what I say or how forcibly I say it. Once I start actively advocating Animal Rights, it’s hard for me not to sound pushy about it. It’s easy for me to forget that people can simply walk away from me.

            However good I think our ‘vegan’ idea is, it can’t be forced onto people. Any uninvited contributions will seem like intrusions, even attacks. And if I aim to push my way into peoples’ private space, when I say to them, as if asking an innocent question, “You don’t still eat meat do you?”, I’m likely to get a rude shock. Once my view is ‘fired’ at people (and they feel suitably uncomfortable) they’re put off. And what is worse, they might even swear off the idea for ever, and I obviously don’t want that.

If you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen?

74:

Becoming vegan is like buying a beautifully engineered car with its engine ready but still cold. It needs a kick start. It needs more than the fuel of fearlessness - it needs a confidence kick-start to overcome inertia. Going vegan is like falling in love and then learning how to live together. One can grasp the big idea well enough, but how to get the brain around it, to spark the great engine into life and keep it running?

            We’re all just humans with frailties and fears, so when we ‘go vegan’ we must try to get energy wherever we can find it. I had to talk about it, even boast about it, anything to make it work for me. I squeezed it too hard so that I wouldn’t let my good idea lose momentum. I knew this idea deserved my best shot but it wasn’t obvious. My most difficult problem wasn’t about denying myself certain foods, it was people’s opinions of me and my own attitude towards them that caused the initial trouble for me, especially their reluctance to discuss the subject with me.

            For all vegans, young or old, living within the conventional world, which is so reliant on animals, we have to learn to live in some sort of peace, with that. For us it’s psychologically ‘hot’ in this ‘kitchen’, but on no account can we ever afford to ‘get out the kitchen’.

Resolve

72: 

The decision to ‘go vegan’ is the start to a whole lifestyle change. When I first latched onto this idea it was the biggest idea I’d come across. It said to me that I was heading towards becoming non-violent, animal friendly, green and therefore in the best position to help transform the world. As an ideal it’s pretty much indisputable! “Great”, I thought, but how will I keep it up? I knew that once I started something this big I must continue with it. If I gave up I’d hate myself.

            So what couldn’t I fail with? Certainly, I wanted to leave the violence of all that animal killing behind me, but how would I deal with all the food temptations and more particularly the violence of the society in which I was brought up?

As I was heading into all this the one thing I feared most was becoming overwhelmed by it all and backtracking. When I took on a vegan diet and threw out my leather shoes I was still inspired, but after a while I felt the loss of things. I could see that it was a good idea in theory, but was it really making me feel better? I had my doubts but not over principles, only practice. Would I be making a rod for my own back? Shouldn’t I toss the idea around and let it settle into my life, let my mates know what I was doing, make sure I was comfortable with it?

            What happened was that I stopped eating animal stuff. I found plant-based foods weren’t bad at all. Good in fact. That made me think, “So far so good”, and think well of myself. But I wanted more. And that’s when I hit a hurdle.

I wanted everyone to be supportive, and they weren’t. I faced social isolation. Being vegan was starting to feel like a burden. I even started to think my friends didn’t like me anymore. But that led me to think much more deeply about friendships and communication, and that in turn led me to see the importance of maintaining strong relationships. It got me thinking about non-violence, not just eating cruelty-free food but interacting gently with my non-vegan friends.

            So, I thought the diet change was going to be a big  problem, and it wasn’t (although to this day I do miss Mars Bars - I can still remember how they tasted and how the chocolate and caramel and toffee made for something special confection-wise). With a few new products in the cupboard and by using a few new recipes, I never looked back. I was so pleased that I didn’t miss animal-products much at all.

            My main worry was my resolve, whether it would fade once the novelty had worn off. Would I be able to give it a proper chance? I already knew people who’d gone half way and never progressed beyond that, as vegetarians. I couldn’t help thinking it was a great start. But why stop there? For my part, I would go in full bore. I would try to use sheer will-power.  I’d do just about anything to get to the ‘other side’.

            Some people are gradual diet changers, some sudden. But that’s just food. There are other issues to face, like being seen as going weird. True, I had stopped eating foods everyone else ate but I didn’t worry about that - but had I gone weird in another way? Could there be something disturbing in me - that by going vegan was I setting myself above others? Was I positioning myself to lay value judgements on people. Was I doing this to make me feel superior and protect myself from being judged. Was I doing this to prevent my own self-judgement?

            As a vegan I was starting to experience all these changes, on many levels. And something else was happening – a tension was growing between my passion and my impatience. I wanted to drop all the addictions straight away so that I could become a true animal advocate. Or did I mean an evangelist for veganism?

I mention all this as a lead up to some important associated problems, concerning advocacy and getting others to come on board. I wanted to lie and say, “It’s worth it. Go vegan. It’s not that hard at all”. But in truth I knew it could, for someone like me, be quite a difficult change to make. And yet the idea is strong enough, inspiring enough and revolutionary enough to brave all pressures. It is, after all, one of the main doors into the future. 

Energy

69:

On the face of it, dynamic non-violence needs an ability to discriminate right from wrong. But this leads us into the quagmire of value judgment. I am, for instance, in the ‘right-thinking’ camp, and compare myself to what I think of as the ‘wrong-thinkers’, to whom I’m unattractive and maybe even dangerous.

            I’d be on safer ground if I spent less thinking about good and bad and concentrated on energy. I think that non-violence is a highly efficient energy, and I want to produce it and gain from it. If my energy is used for non-violent activity I’ll experience no energy-drain, whereas violence drains precious energy.

            I’ve never heard of anyone actually advocating violence, it’s what we resort to, for pragmatic reasons, more like a fall-back position. The quick-fix is a temptation, and any violence involved is overlooked, not because we like being wicked but because we think we can take a short cut and get a result. And get away with it. We don’t see how it sucks energy out of us. Meat eaters think they can ‘get away’ with their meat diet without too much damage. But of course damage shows up later, down the track, sometimes too late for rescue.

            “Damn it”, they might say.  “If only we’d been less obstinate, listened to our instincts and advice ... and become vegan ... and not taken such risks with our lives as well as the lives of others”. 

Over-stepping the mark

518:

What mostly keeps vegans and omnivores apart is that one side knows what the other doesn’t. To the omnivore, any information about food-animals and vegan diets is always pushed away, not because anyone believes in cruelty to animals or wants to indulge themselves in any way but because no one likes a bible-basher pushing unwelcome information at them. As free-willed adults, living in Western democracies, we don’t like being told what to do, especially what to eat.

I find myself being a bit of basher - “You have to hear what I’ve got to say, for your own safety”. Omnivores question my authority to say what I say. “You have no right to push me on that point”, they would say if it weren’t likely to lead them into deeper waters.  

I can corner someone whilst staying just inside the boundary of acceptable pushiness, and I’ll be doing some good for the animals too. But what a risk! Gambling the chance of a sensible, low-key discussion of the issues, for the sake of making a ‘hit’. It’s tempting. I’m so used to having my views put down or ignored that ‘pushing a point’ seems justified. And for me, doing it feels good. It feels courageous, and perhaps adds another notch on my stick. It’s satisfying to tell an ‘insensitive omnivore’ what I think of their arguments. I owe it to the animals and maybe I’ll go in boots and all. But perhaps I should wise up. I already have enough problems of communication without provoking or frightening people.

I think what I need to do is turn around my attitude, from confrontation to having sympathy and compassion for the tight spot all omnivores find themselves in. They are probably very reluctant to change their lifestyle and diet but are nevertheless haunted, as I am, by the cruelty of animal farming. Although the issues might seem worth discussing there’s a let-out for them, since they comprise 99% of the population and can shelter behind the normality of what others do.

My view is that I need to get over being ‘insistent’. Even though it’s a significant issue for me (as it is, of course, for the animals themselves). But it isn’t an issue for most others, who believe that animals are here for us to use. Human beliefs are as change-proof as reality itself - things are as we believe them to be. Many believe life without hamburgers is no life at all.

To carry someone across, from their belief to our own, is a big challenge. It’s likely people know what they do, but their need for their favourite foods clashes with a dissatisfaction within themselves; there’s the poisoning effect on one’s health and the poisoning of conscience over what’s done to animals. Changing all that for the sake of a higher level of self-satisfaction seems a high price to pay. 

I know, even if I’m persuasive enough to get them to try a vegan diet that they won’t stay vegan for long if they’re still hankering for something that’s ‘off the list’. I somehow have to turn that around so they can see the light at the end of the tunnel, which goes beyond taste bud satisfaction and disinterest in the welfare of animals and leads them to a less haunted future.

NOT knowing

517:


I know omnivores have arguments of their own but they never say what they are. I do know that vegans have opposite arguments, and I can only state what they are based on and say how sad it is that people have sold out to easy living. Outrage is dead. Societies everywhere in the world have allowed, participated and encouraged outrageous cruelty to farm animals.

After about 1945 (almost a lifetime away) they invented diabolical cruelties for farm animal. At the very same time science showed that animals were not necessary for food, and that human life could be sustained on a plant-based diet. The opportunity to live a cruelty-free life was turned down. Every informed person ignored what they believed could be true. A few early vegans went on to show the science was correct. That, in tune with what Ghandi was demonstrating at the time, was a doorway into a non-violent nature for mankind. It was a response to the cruelty of human nature so amply demonstrated in the violence of the 1940s.

On the domestic front, the greatest cruelty came with the birth of the battery cage, a violation of Nature if ever there was one. It matched the violence of the recent war – now there was violence inside our very food.

Vegans vowed to eat no more violence-food. These were the first experimental plant-diet advocates. They were the first animal rights advocates, who would go on to prove that a vegan diet worked on all levels. They were pointing to a non-violent human-species-to-come.

Resistance to non-violence has strengthened in today’s Information Age. Everyone is educated because information is so available but resistance, to certain unsavoury information, is stealing our greatest freedoms. Our freedom to think for ourselves, along with our much prized freedom of speech, is being eroded. Today, information is pushed away so that people can live life to the full. Cruelty issues, regarding farm animals, are off-limits.

Pretending to NOT know things has become as important, to some people, as knowing things.