I’ve never been one for New Year’s Resolutions.
The New Year is just an arbitrary point on the calendar. No more special than a new month, new week, or new day. Yet we seem to attach inordinate significance to it.
Perhaps it would be best to think of each day in this way. Instead of trying to make resolutions involving long-term plans, we could make more modest daily resolutions.
Our brains are poorly equipped to deal with the future and we very often don’t do the things necessary for long term-plans. We’re very good at post hoc rationalizations for why we didn't follow through, but not so good at the actual follow-through.
With that in mind, I’m going to try to be a little better at communicating with others every day.
It’s another skill that we humans aren't particularly good at in general. We misunderstand and are misunderstood more times each day than we care to admit or even realize.
Some months back, this was brought to my attention when I heard someone say of me that I thought he didn't have any compassion because he wasn't vegan.
Not just any someone… but my best friend.
If someone who knows me better than any other human being on the planet can so profoundly misunderstand me, how can I even hope to communicate effectively with people who don’t know me so well? With strangers?
Let me be as clear as I can with what abilities I have right now to communicate.
Rest assured that if I talk to you about veganism, I definitely don’t think you are without compassion. I. indeed, think the exact opposite.
There are psychopaths and sociopaths who truly have no compassion. No empathy for others.
I have no idea how to talk to them. I’m not even clear that it would ever be possible to effectively communicate a concept like veganism to them.
When I talk to anyone about choosing a vegan lifestyle, I am presupposing that they are compassionate. It would be more reasonable to assume that I think you are incapable of kindness and empathy if I don’t mention veganism to you.
So, you may notice by my Facebook posts that I believe all my friends are compassionate. And this belief is several orders of magnitude greater than that for my best friend. Without his compassion, kindness, and frequent selflessness, it’s unlikely that I would even be alive today.
I cannot overstate this point.
I am inspired every day through this friendship to try to be a better person, more cognizant of how my actions affect others.
When I speak to him and others about veganism, I am presupposing that they are compassionate. I just want to point out that there is a conflict between their beliefs and their actions. This is the cognitive dissonance that will hopefully drive them toward living in accordance with their values.
If you detect anger in anything I say about this, it is directed toward me more than anyone else. It is the greatest shame of my life that I spent roughly half of it consuming the flesh of animals while having the temerity to say that I loved them. In retrospect it seems like a rather hypocritical stance, yet I was somehow able to suppress this disconnect of values and actions for too many years. We are immersed in cultural conditioning that leaves us with the implicit assumption that it’s okay.
It’s not.
For about two decades, I thought being a vegetarian was enough.
It’s not.
If you’re still consuming dairy and eggs, you are financially supporting industries that are, indeed, likely more horrific and violent than the meat industry itself. I am ashamed that I didn't see this sooner.
And that is the motivation behind the evangelical vegan you know me as today. Spreading the word is my attempt to atone in some small way for all the harm I’ve caused. I’m doing what I wish someone had done for me many years ago. I wish someone would have presented me with the facts and challenged me to think about what I was doing.
So that will be my challenge to my friends. Examine your beliefs and actions. Do what you know is right. Be vegan.
I am addressing this challenge to all my friends, but particularly those of you who rescue and foster dogs and cats, but are not yet vegan. In doing what you do for companion animals, you are sending a clear signal that nonhumans matter morally, but you are choosing to ignore this precept with regard to other animals, many of whom are every bit as loving and intelligent as your dogs. You are underwriting a system that tortures and murders sentient life on a mind-boggling scale.
We condemn at least 56 billion sentient land animals to death and worse every year. And that number is dwarfed by the devastation we visit on sea life.
Comprehending numbers on this scale is yet another thing we humans are kind of bad at, so it’s easy to read statistics like this and fail to connect them to real life atrocities, but please try to wrap your head around it, because it’s important. If those of us who have compassion and love animals cannot be counted on to stand up for them, what hope do these poor, innocent creatures have?
Please don’t think that what you do as an individual won’t help. If everyone took this rather fatalistic stance, no injustice would ever be overcome. So, do what you can and encourage others to do so as well. Sometimes the progress is excruciatingly slow, but the world is changing.
Animal rights is the great social justice issue of our time. They have no voice or power to improve their circumstance and that’s what makes our crimes against them so despicable.
I implore you to be an advocate for the voiceless and powerless.
Please, please, please make this your resolution every day. Try to make the lives of others better, regardless of their species. The moral baseline of this commitment is veganism, unless you’re completely comfortable in participating in a system that procures nourishment (and clothing, and entertainment, etc...) through unnecessary violence.
If you’re really okay with doing nothing to help at this point, I truly don’t know how to talk to you.
I consider it a failure on my part to effectively communicate the importance of this issue, because I know that if I do it right, my friends will respond. They're too good not to.
My resolution is to improve my skill in communication.
Let yours be to show the kind of person you really are by refusing take part in the exploitation of the voiceless nonhuman Earthlings we share this planet with.
