A few things:
1. I updated my vegan shoe pinterest with some cool vegan shoes such as these:
There are some excellent shoes on there, so check it out if you so desire to clothe your feet in man-made materials. Vegan Shoes 4 Lyfe.
2. Following Anita Krajnc, head of
Toronto Pig Save, on facebook is very educational. I feel as if I have gone down the rabbit hole, so to speak.
If you want to learn more about animal rights stuff, just
subscribe to her posts and then check out the pages of groups she shares and whatnot.
I don’t even know where to begin.
I now feel certain that animal rights will be the next great battle our society wages for freedom and justice and all that.
Everywhere I see more and more people mentioning veganism. This movement is growing!
Along time ago when I started with vegetarianism, I always used to think to myself “what difference am I making. So I’m not ordering meat at a restaurant…big deal. 1 billion other people are.” Still I stuck to it because it felt like the right thing to do, not really knowing why, besides I loved animals and my dogs.
After all this time I feel I finally understand my true motivation for being a vegetarian and now vegan.
For one thing, it DOES make a difference. Little by little, person by person, vegans infiltrated mainstream media and awareness.
Check out
this blog post from the great blog
Once Upon a Vegan. She shares the story of a man who privately financed the transport of 669 Jewish children to England…because they were going to the death camps. He saved their lives, but no one, even in his family, ever knew about it until 50 years later he wife found a log in his attic listing all the names of the children he saved. She contacted them and there is a video clip on the blog post showing him meeting some of the children he saved years later…
I could watch it a hundred times. It’s amazing.
She links to this article which tells the
whole story of Nicholas Winton. One of the most touching things I’ve ever read. At the end of the article it says he wears a ring given to him by one of the children he saved which said
“save one life, save the world”.
(nicholas winton with one of the children he saved)
This guy never asked to be recognized, he just quietly did a beautiful thing. I imagine he felt he could die happy after that meeting, knowing that he made a difference in the lives of so many grown men and women. You have to see
the vid in the blog post–so good!
3. Speaking of the Holocaust, I saw
this video Anita Krajnc posted on Facebook the other day–these two guys discussing why people become violently offended and write vegans off when they compare the exploitation of animals to the holocaust. They do a fantastic job of discussing it, and it’s really fun to watch.
The similarities to the things I saw in the slaughterhouse videos and in the trucks thanks to the youtube videos of Toronto Pig Save have really been haunting me with how similar they seem to the holocaust. Gas Chambers. Cattle Cars. Horrible experiments on animals. The dark barren barns chickens and pigs, for example, live in before being slaughtered.
The moment I decided not to look away and “bore witness” was the moment everything changed. Now I feel like I want to see more, to know what is really happening. Now all these extreme animal rights people’s tirades are really making sense!
When I learned about the holocaust in middle school I read a lot of books about it…in my typical, disturbed and depressed yet can’t look away fashion. I always remember thinking, how could this have happened only 50 years ago? It didn’t make sense. I looked around me and didn’t see evil people who were capable of doing anything like that. It seemed like a blip on the radar. And yet I imagined myself, being half Jewish, in that situation and tried to make it feel real.
Now I see that those behaviors are still in place but they are hidden from our view…in the slaughterhouses of the world. In the video I mentioned above, they talk about how evil is often just no one taking responsibility…like in a bureaucracy where normal people take orders but don’t want to take responsibility for what they are doing–that’s how evil happens. Exactly!
Clicking around, I found this Holocaust Comparison Project, a photo essay by David Sztybel, that the video is responding to. It makes fascinating and disturbing points. The same patterns of violence that existed in the Holocaust are very much alive and well.
At the end of the photo essay there is this post script:
Edgar Kupfer was a survivor of the Dachau death camp. After his liberation, he furtively scrawled the following message on the wall of a hospital barrack:
Wow.
I understand the Holocaust is an extremely sensitive subject. But like they say in the video, by discussing the past, we can learn from the past.
Your thoughts? Do you feel that you know your motivations for being vegan or vegetarian on a deep level or do you sometimes question? What do you think about the Holocaust Comparison Project?
