wish i could take the credit for this...

but i can't... what i can do is share the wit and wisdom of marla from vegan feminist agitator as she articulates what many vegans think and feel with her sixth annual disgruntled vegan alphabet...

from vegan feminist agitator

A is for Another flaky “former vegan” celebrity just went on a talk show and is now on the paleo bandwagon so could we please stop already with the celebrity worship? Pretty please? It never ends well.

B is for “But what about the Inuit? But what about the Native Americans? But what about the lions? But what about the microscopic insects you kill? But what about soy? But what about eating humane meat? But I’m part Italian. But eating meat is how I honor my ancestors. But I was raised eating meat. But I give a blessing. But I give thanks. But my guru said it was okay. But I need the protein. But I am allergic to soy, wheat, all grains, all fruits and all vegetables except for celery. But I need the iron. But I just eat a little meat. But I don’t eat red meat. But I only support the best farms. But…”

C is for Cough in front of the wrong person and it is incontrovertible proof that I have a vegan-induced nutritional deficiency.

D is for Delusion, because apparently there is a just and compassionate way to needlessly slaughter other sensitive beings as long as you have an unlimited supply of it.

E is for the Eerie silence that happens whenever I get stopped by a Greenpeace canvasser or the Sierra Club calls and I ask them about their organization’s public position on eating animals.

F is for For once, could I either opt out of the Secret Santa exchange at work or get someone who doesn’t give me a basket of alpaca milk soaps from her brother-in-law’s farm?

G is for Gotcha moments, and, no, you didn’t “get me” with your inquiry about what my shoes or coat are made of but try again, sport, because this endless game of pin-the-tail-on-the-hypocrite never gets old or predictable.

H is for Har-har-har, writing People Eating Tasty Animals in the middle of a debate never fails to make an original and devastating counter-argument. Touché! How could anyone ever recover from such a salient point?

I is for Ick, no, I really don’t miss eating corpses. Do I look like Hannibal Lecter or something? Fava beans and a nice chianti, though, those would be fine.

J is for that Junk science video you posted about “plants feeling pain.” If this is more persuasive to you than, I don’t know, the lack of a central nervous system and an evolutionary incentive for pain reception and you ignore the fact that far more plants are consumed when eating a diet that includes animals, I am going to have to question if you are really sincere about your convictions.

K is for karma because sometimes that is all we can hope for in life and we have all heard about her general disposition.

L is for Logical Fallacies because whether were are talking about a strawman argument (“Vegans hate people and only care about animals!”), the slippery slope argument (“If we stop eating animals, they will take over the world!”) the tu quoque approach (“How can you talk about animal suffering when you are stepping on bugs, hmm?”) and an anecdote (“My cousin was vegan for two weeks and she almost died from a protein deficiency!”), these are all examples of the logical fallacies people who want to continue eating animals will wrap themselves in like a warm blanket. A blanket with a bunch of holes in it nonetheless.

M is for the Massive meltdown that happens when a vegan asks her affluent grass-fed, organic paleo cousin how many worlds we’d need in order to sustain the world’s population with his way of eating.

N is for the Namaste-spouting New Agers who try to justify eating animals and are so self-involved as to claim that “judgments” are worse than unnecessary violence and destroying the planet. Altogether now: om…

O is for Okay, do you honestly believe that vegans are pushing their views on you? Have you looked at the world through the lens of someone who doesn’t think that animals are “food” lately? Have you tried to look at the world through the lens of a being who is born and raised solely for the purpose of being eaten lately?

P is for Paranoia, as in, “I said soy milk, right? Because if my coffee has cow’s milk in it I will be really upset and disgusted. Okay, wait, I see you’ve charged me extra because apparently destroying our planet is not enough for animal product consumers, now they should be able to get what they want without any penalties at all and when is a vegan coffee shop finally going to open around here??? So, anyway, how do I know the barista didn’t make a mistake?”

Q is for having exceeded my annual Quota of weird looks and passive-aggressive remarks about my meatless roast at my family’s Thanksgiving dinner within five minutes of being there. Because family…

R is for Really, I don’t want to hear about how much you love animals but vegans “just take it too far” because, you know, this is kind of idiotic if you think about it without your ego getting in the way.  

S is for being Self-righteous because it’s better than being self-wrongteous.

T is for Turducken because what kind of twisted, Caligula-minded sadist invented this grotesquery?

U is for the Universal sign of warm weather, which means that when I can finally open my windows for a few months, the smell of charred, tortured flesh filling the air greets me. Yay.

V is for getting Verklempt at the Vicarious thrill we enjoy when one of our protégés goes off and becomes an awesome little vegan agitator in his or her own right. Fly, little bird. Fly! Oh, wait. This was supposed to be complaining. Okay, V is for Vasectomy because, please, 98% of humanity, let’s look into it. Snip, snip, done.

W is for Wings as in do you know that people actually sit around and eat a bird’s severed limbs and then dump the bones in a bowl and, um, tofu is gross? Oooookay, then.

X is for the Xenophobes who think that Asian cultures that eat dogs are barbaric while they themselves eat dead chickens and cows. Um, what???

Y is for the boiled Yellow squash plate vegans are served at our cousin’s wedding that no amount of salt, pepper, denial or wishful thinking will be able to remedy. This is why an emergency nutrition bar should always be in the glove compartment.

Z is for the Zany situations that turn your life into a tragicomedy that will make for an excellent screenplay for a film that roughly two percent of the population might be willing to see one day."

i've got nothing to add... marla has said it all...(but you can read her previous alphabets - sixth annual airing of grievances (each word is a link to one of her earlier alphabets)...

a 'share' from vegan feminist agitator...

i'm almost back to blogging - but not quite... having just moved - yes, time to get my own space again, with shadow and petey of course, and dealing with 'life crap' - the ending of something i should have realised had ended ages ago, a sick mother hospitalised, etc. etc.,  i just couldn't pass up sharing this brilliant post from the wonderful marla of vegan feminist agitator...

Looking at Life Through the Vegan Lens

“It's not what you're looking at that matters, it's what you see.” - Henry David Thoreau

For most of my life, I have walked around in a comfortably fuzzy world; it’s a misty place with blurred, dull edges, and I love it here for the most part. Acclimated to my astigmatism and poor eyesight, I still prefer it this way. I recently got glasses, though, and suddenly everything is so very sharp and crisp. I am noticing faces in a way that I didn’t before but this new clarity of vision also means that the dirt on the floor is much more pronounced to me as well. There is comfort in the blurred edges and sometimes the laser-sharp clarity of the world I can see so much better now has me longing to retreat to that old hazy landscape. It’s better to be able to see but it’s not without its challenges. 

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."

marla's wonderful 'wordsmithing' never ceases to uplift me and put a smile on my face for her articulation and validation of me and my thoughts - you can't 'un-see- what you have seen, you can't 'un-know' what you know... thank you wonderful womon...

the personal is political...

it's been a while since i've heard that 'rallying cry'... it was something we womyn's liberationists used to chant 'way back' in the 70s, so it was quite wonderful to read it in the 'here and now' as the title of vegan feminist agitator's latest blog post "The Personal is Political: Veganism is a Feminist Act"!!! there are some things you read that just resonate, and this is one of those posts, so while i'm procrastinating over writing a new post myself, this one is definitely worth the share (along with her 'rosie the riveter' graphic!)...

"I was born a feminist. I’m not sure where it came from – perhaps my dynamo of a grandmother, confident to the core – but growing up, I never thought that I was anything but a complete equal to everyone else. I was a natural feminist and when I learned that there was a real need for it - that there were those who believed in arbitrary, illogical and repressive hierarchies - the fire within me to correct injustices found its fuel source. When I saw kids throw rocks at squirrels, heard people make bigoted remarks, witnessed others being treated unfairly, my hands would involuntarily ball up into tight little fists. Even if I wanted to keep quiet, to not attract the ire of that bully down the block who threw rocks at the squirrels or the loudmouth at the bar years later, I physically couldn’t do it. It’d be like asking a volcano to please not explode. My feminism and my passion for equality and fairness were always fully interwoven and integrated."  

here i believe though is the time to send you on over to Marla's blog to read her post in its entirety...