On the Disheartening Aspects of Animal Advocacy and Beginning Again
In animal rights advocacy, moments or days of feeling encouraged and heartened are too often countered or overshadowed by experiences that frustrate, dishearten, and discourage. It can be a one-step-forward, two-steps-backward movement. Sometimes what you think is progress isn't. Sometimes what you think is change is more of the same. Sometimes what you put all your faith into disappoints. And especially if you devote much of yourself to this movement, if you're immersed in it every day, those steps backward, those disheartening moments, those discouraging not-changes or missed opportunities can wear you down and come awfully close to breaking your spirit. When you know that you're fighting for the most oppressed, most abused, greatest-suffering beings on this planet, and literally tens of millions of them are being brutally slaughtered every single day after a too-short life full of exploitation and suffering, and yet people still seem not to care and are content to push it all aside--simply because, for example, they like how those animals taste and consider change to be inconvenient--and the movement's efforts are still mocked and marginalized rather than supported, it can be absolutely crushing.
I have plans to see Dar Williams tonight with a friend, the first time I've spent the time and money to go listen to live music in a year (by comparison, a few years ago, this was something I did at least once a week). But I'm in one of those disheartened places today, where I'm so overwhelmed by it all that I'm not even looking forward to doing something I love and to seeing a musician I adore. But I'm going to go anyway. I'm going to have a beer or two. I'm going to cry with the songs that make me cry and laugh with the songs that make me laugh and try to enjoy the company of a friend. I'm going to work very hard to let it all go for a few hours--because that's what I have to do if I want to remain an effective advocate for animals, rather than disintegrate into an emotional mess.
In this moment, I am left thinking about something Joanna Lucas of Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary wrote a couple years ago, in an essay I reposted on this blog on New Year's Day 2009:
When the darkness of the world seems overwhelming, unstoppable, crushing, when beings like Celeste, who love life and sing about love, are being turned into meat and handbags by the millions every day, when the pain of loving them seems unbearable, the answer is NOT to stop loving, NOT to stop caring, NOT to add to the darkness. The answer is to love more, deeper, wider. To love despite the darkness and the pain. Indeed, to love because of it. To love those who need it most desperately, not only those we happen to like, to love because your love is profoundly, vitally needed, not because it is self-gratifying. To love as though life depended on it. It does.
This is what being vegan means. Securing, one vegan meal at a time, a space in the world where innocents like Celeste can simply keep what is rightfully theirs - their life, their freedom, their meager, pathetic, or truly magnificent shot at happiness, refusing to take their lives simply because we have the power. It is the only thing worth starting a new year, a new day, for.
Have a lovely afternoon and evening, friends. Give a dog or a cat or a rat, or a chicken or a turkey, or a goat or a pig, or a cow or a sheep a big extra hug for me today. I hope to be lighter tomorrow.
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Note: I can predict that at least a few of my fellow animal advocates will immediately want to comment here, imploring me to pick up a copy of pattrice jones's excellent book Aftershock. Worry not, friends--I have it.
Related posts (two of which will open better in Firefox than in Internet Explorer because of long comment threads, which IE seems to struggle with):
Stephanie Ernst
wrote the original Animal Rights blog at Change.org until December 2009. She can now be found at Animal Rights & AntiOppression.
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