I believe that the
same could be said about those of us who have altered the lens through
which we see the world. This is what happens when you go vegan. I think
that once you can truly see life from this new, radically different
framework, the lens through which you view the world is likely to be
altered forever. For some of us, when the old lens shatters, it becomes
obsolete, useless to us. We can no longer pretend to see things the way
we did before so we can not go back to living as we did before. Others
do what they can to tape the broken lens back together, a piece of tape
here, some glue there, in order to not have to discard it. A
successfully transformed perspective from a shattered and replaced lens
is one that rearranges how we see our place in the world; though it is
unsettling to suddenly see things that our culture doesn’t want us to
see, things that are pervasive and disturbing, we can remedy that
disharmony by changing our lives to accommodate our new vision. Whether
it was because of a searing epiphany or a more gradual toppling of the
excuses we clung to, the end result is that we are not the same as we
once were. We are changed in fundamental ways that are often invisible
but no less tangible, and this altered perspective can often make us
incompatible with accepting what we once did as “the way things are.”
We are vegan.
A fundamental aspect of being vegan means that we now see the world in
new ways: we see dead cows where others see hamburgers, we see tortured
birds where others see omelets, we understand that we are equals in
suffering. It’s not because we necessarily want to see this way but
because we often cannot “un-see” it. It is our new lens no matter the
challenges because living with a
clarity of vision is so essential to us.
As
vegans, we are often told that we are insipid or melodramatic for
seeing things the way we do, and, implicitly or explicitly, we are asked
to stop making life uncomfortable for those who want to
continue
eating animals unabated. How can we do that, though? Simply by existing
and often without words, as vegans, we represent the elephant in the
room and the truth about the violence we inflict needlessly. Most would
prefer not to see this. We are provocative simply by existing and we
can’t help that. The dissonance between what we see and what we are
asked to pretend not to see is a bizarre tension vegans are expected to
simply accept as an unspoken condition of adapting to life.
Needless to say, this is hard to accept.
We
are being asked to not see (or to behave as if we don’t see) something
that would be obvious to anyone who wasn’t complicit in maintaining the
avoidance of this, and something that we see nakedly, without artifice
and without trying. That we see violence and we see killing isn’t
necessarily a judgment, it is a statement of fact: we see this because
this is what is happening. We’re not supposed to say, think or even see
this, though. When vegans, approximately 2% of the population, are told
that we are oppressing others because we speak, think and simply see the
truth about the horrors that are inflicted on animals, a dysfunctional
dynamic is in place. We are being asked to maintain a lie about
something when we cannot avoid seeing the truth.
We are looking
at the world through a different lens and this lens changes everything.
It makes life challenging at times but being able to clearly see and
then act on what we see is an incredible honor and privilege. How
fortunate we are to have this rare vision. What a responsibility, too.
That we could spend a fraction of our lives letting people know what we
are able to see and perhaps help them to develop a new lens is a
blessing beyond measure."
