There's No Such Thing as an Ex-Vegan

There's some confusion on social and mainstream media. Apparently about quite a number of things, but in particular about what a vegan is, and what veganism is all about. When a celebrity (or what passes for one) announces that s/he is now an ex-vegan, social media trumpets that as if it's somehow significant, or has relevance to the reality of veganism.

Veganism is not an "identity" that one selects as part of their social persona. It's not about virtue signaling, or positioning oneself as trendy or hip. It has nothing to do with "wokeness", no matter how much the socially pious pretend otherwise.

Veganism is a paradigm, an ethical framework, one that rejects speciesism. It’s about avoiding harm to other sentient beings in all the ways that are under one’s control. While the term Vegan is a 20th century development, the ethical framework it describes is thousands of years old.

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                         Speciesism is no more rational than racism or sexism

  

When someone really sees, finally - really gets the cruelty, the torment, the horrific brutality we inflict on other living, breathing, feeling beings for trivial reasons of taste, habit, and convenience, there's no going back. Once you really get it you are changed forever. Therefore, there is no such things as an "ex-vegan". That person was never vegan to begin with. They just ate plant-based for awhile. And veganism is about more than food choices.

It's about choosing the non-leather shoes. It's about not buying products that were tested on animals whenever that’s possible. It’s about not wearing other animals. It’s about not trashing the habitat of other animals with toxic chemicals, your garbage, or your 4WD vehicle. It’s about buying the upholstered furniture rather than the chair made from dead animals. And this is actually simple once you get it. 

For me, veganism is a response to life. A response that affirms life, and the connection that exists between all life.

It's a response to the grotesque cruelty and misery of Industrial Ag, and the profit-at-all-costs mentality of laissez-faire capitalism. It's a response to the mindless, unexamined tenets of culture, the assumptions inherent in the group-think dynamic.

It's a response to antiquated and patriarchal notions of entitlement.

And possibly above all, it's a response that affirms the possibility of higher levels of consciousness and the ability to evolve and transcend.

Veganism is a response that says Yes: Yes to awareness, yes to compassion, yes to the earth, yes to the ability to choose non-violence over the limited, myopic selfishness and grasping of commercial culture and its endless programming.

This response is a refuge. An ethical and spiritual framework that provides shelter from the deluge of cultural and governmental derangement raining down on us daily. It's an always-accessible touchstone that can't be stripped away. It's a freedom, a profoundly essential one - the freedom to evolve beyond one's programming. This includes the freedom to decline participation, to stand up in the middle of moribund custom and say, "I'm not participating in this".

I refuse to be the reason why living, conscious, complex beings suffer horrendously cruel lives and brutal, agonizing deaths. I can't control what goes on "out there", but I can control what goes on "in here", and what I choose to participate in. 

Many people erroneously believe that there's no point in adopting veganism because animal exploitation is ubiquitous, and so entrenched in our culture, but real change has always started with a limited number of people. As Margaret Mead said, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has".                

Doing no harm starts with the fork, and that begins with us, as individuals. 

 

 If you would like a relatively quick overview of why vegan, I suggest starting with the documentaries Earthlings and Dominion. Dominion is also a powerful book by Matthew Scully. Here's some more information:

 

 My sister told me, "it's a brand new chapter of life for us", as we hugged goodbye. Her vehicle was packed to the top with the last remaining items she'd retrieved, before we did a final walk-through and locked the house. "Definitely for you", I replied. She looked at me intently and said, "it is for you, too".

The house, my parents' house, was where she'd lived for the better part of the last decade, caring for my dad after my mom died of Alzheimer's in a memory care facility. It was the house mom and dad chose together in the early 90's, the one in which they had hoped to share a lengthy retirement together, doing the things they loved. A house in the mountains, on a hilly acre of woods, surrounded by the birds and wildlife they loved to watch, feed, and talk about.

The house was full of their energy, the things they treasured; pictures of family, antiques made or owned by long-dead ancestors, a mind-boggling variety of books, lots of flowering plants in the windows. They both loved being in the living room and looking out the big picture window, watching the incredible variety of birds that visited an eccentric-but-charming array of feeders they'd positioned near that window. Along with the white squirrels, which dad had a love-hate relationship with, and the deer and raccoons, who they also fed.

After my mom was gone, that's where my dad spent most of his time. Especially as he gradually became less ambulatory, and his multiple car wrecks caused us to insist that he stop driving.  If it hadn't been for my newly-widowed sister moving in there to manage the household (and later his care), dad never would've had the gift of being able to remain there. I was 30 minutes away, working full-time, and trying to handle my own small organic fruit farm. My brother, in TN.

The living room with the big view of the natural world that he loved so much was also where he died. Several feet from the window, in a rented hospital bed that hospice had ordered. He was beyond seeing out the window at that point, but part of him knew where he was, knew that family was there with him.

And this treasured home of my parents is what we spent the past 2 and a half painful, chaotic months trying to clear out. Daily difficult decisions about what to keep, what to donate, the mountain of family photos spanning generations, what to shred, what could be sold to satisfy the probate court, dealing with the horrendous consequences of an incompetent and/or corrupt estate lawyer and a hopelessly mangled estate plan. But that's a story for another day.

The house stands empty now, ready to be sold. Bare walls, bare windows, rooms that echo. It's only in my mind that the gentle sound of my mother's laughter, and my dad's booming hello reverberates. Only in my mind do I see the fireplace burning, family holiday gatherings full of amazing homemade goodies, the beautifully decorated Christmas trees that my dad took so much pride and pleasure in. And later, his shaky, shuffling steps with a cane, on the slow trek to the kitchen table.

In reality, it's all gone. All that's here is a startlingly empty house. And silence. 

So I go home to my own little sanctuary and my own silence, accompanied as usual by the multiple losses in my own life these past few months. Struggling to keep moving forward, to focus on the right now, just breathing, and putting one foot in front of the other. It's a new chapter, right?

 So, we're looking at the end of 2022. One day left. In reality, of course, it's not another year gone by, but just another day. Another single earth-sun orbit, in a never-ending stream of of such revolutions since the beginning of the planet.

The fictions we create around time have their uses - we measure our lives in days, weeks, months, years. One of the primary identifiers of people, among other things, is age. How old are you? What year were you born? What year did you graduate? How old is that leftover green bean casserole in the refrigerator?

We can agree to show up at 9:00 a.m., or 2:00 p.m., or 6:00 p.m., and we all know, by monitoring the clock, how to make that happen. Well, most of us, anyway!

But these existential fictions also snare our minds. We get lulled into beliefs and expectations about "the future". We plan for it, talk about it incessantly, like it's an actual existing thing. Like we have this much expanse of time ahead of us, whatever that may be. So often our attention and focus is on the future, or the past, neither of which exist now. And we miss our very lives as the present moment, the only place life can be lived, goes by unacknowledged.

We allow the scars, the conditioning, the trauma of a long-dead past to keep us emotionally and intellectually frozen, helping generate our fears and projections about "the future". We become clutched up about our goals, with trying to make things happen in the future, hoping once and for all to finally control our future - something no one in history has been able to do, but our egos need some sense of control, don't they?

And the present moment flutters by barely noticed, like a rare and beautiful butterfly that we don't even see. The treasure we have right in front of us is so often ignored, while we're busy anticipating a myriad of imaginary problems or disasters.

Yes, clearly we need to plan, for some of the contingencies in life we can plan for. Especially when others are depending on us. And setting some intentions for ourselves is a positive thing: This is how I would like to conduct myself. This is the kind of work I'd like to put out there. I want the highest good for everyone in this situation. And so on.

I won't be making resolutions for the upcoming year. Truthfully I don't know if I'll be alive by year's end. I'm going to keep my values, my ethics, and a positive intention or two in my travel bag and go from there. I want to see what's truly happening this moment. I want to truly see and hear the friend and loved one with me this moment, rather than the projected stories my ego-based noise voice is narrating nonstop. I want to see what's important to do - or sit with - in this moment, and let that awareness inform whatever action is taken. 

If I can do that, I have a feeling "the future" will unfold with far less stress. And knowing that we can make another choice, or correct our course at any given moment, also takes the stress off. We don't have to know how it will all turn out to act in accordance with what we feel and know in our hearts.