They tell them to laugh off our “childish” and “emotional” rantings, for as long as people see vegans as “weird” or “crazy” or “overly emotional” then they won’t feel the need to further consider how they provide fuel for a society of violence and oppression and devastation.
I have no idea why or how it dawned on me, but ironically it is clear as can be, totally and ridiculously simple and oh-so-obvious - oppression and violence is all the same - no matter who we irrationally justify perpetrating it on.
In rearing us to accept the daily violence and oppression we inflict upon others we deaden our senses to the principles of love, compassion, empathy, and justice, and most of us ultimately end up in this twisted state of dissonance, as I once was (though I didn’t know I was at the time).
It is simple. We are perpetrators - and our methods of ‘criminal’ behavior involves system-wide horrific injustice and oppression and criminal abuse of thinking, feeling, fellow beings. Beings who are able to *clearly* communicate with us their desire to NOT be enslaved. Beings that are able to *clearly* communicate the emotions of love, suffering, and pain. Our utter dismissal of their obvious pleas are so abhorrent to anyone *awake* that the only the comparison that could be rightly made is the wrongness of human slavery or genocide.
Most slave owners didn't see it, whole societies have supported horrific crimes, because they couldn’t *see* it. Most are not cruel people, most are not indecent intentionally. In a sense we are all victims – of lies, manipulation, and an extreme dissonance that allows us to believe we are kind and decent while being horrifically cruel and violent.
Just like nonvegans of today, perpetrators throughout history have explained their violence and cruelty by insisting it was 'natural', or they were abiding by God, or that these other beings (their victims) were “different”, or “inferior”, or did not have the sameness in capacity for emotion or thought. Throughout our entire violent history those have been our [wrong] reasons for being indecent to other sentient lives.
Vegans are mocked and told they think themselves *superior* to others when it is clearly the nonvegans setting nonsensical criterion for who is inferior, deciding whose lives matter less. That is the basis for *all* discrimination and oppression.
Being nonvegan is the pinnacle of being a bully, of ‘judging’ others, of ‘thinking you are better’ than another, yet ironically vegans are the ones [wrongfully] accused of these sentiments. But because we speak of a deeply-set societally-accepted injustice the denial and defensive reactions to these self-evident statements is often taken as insulting rather than as the rather simple TRUTH.
We can change history. We can have peace. We can just stop being violent. We can stop suppressing our inherent love and empathy for all Earthlings. We can focus on the development of the person most of us were born as – a nonviolent, nonracist, non-judgmental, nondiscriminatory, nonspeciesist, with little (none?) desire to harm or kill anyone.
Can people please stop pretending that any sentient Earthling does not have feeling? Does not have the capacity for love, fear, pain, loneliness? The ability to suffer? Does not beg us to be spared? Does not treasure their own life? Because we *KNOW* that they do. Yet we continue to insist on age-old policy we have ALWAYS used when seeking to oppress another - when seeking to justify [albeit irrationally] our perpetration of crimes upon them.
When the people wake to the repetitive cycle, when people stop inflicting violence and oppression upon others, when we covet empathy, knowledge, and compassion…we will have finally figured out peace.
While the victims may have changed, the excuses and brainwashing and horror and oppression is the same.
What is “extreme” is not being vegan.
“As long as there are slaughterhouses... there will be battlefields.”
~ Leo Tolstoy
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