I want you to feel “Empowerful”
I don’t really know where this belongs but this needs to go somewhere. I guess the best way to start is to talk about my dumb-ash big brother* who recently went plant-based and it was what he said to me about his feelings about this choice that I thought was hilarious and so fitting to his character but also so true. He said to me, and this is not word for word, “if you told me how this would make me feel so much better than other people just by not eating animals, I would have done this ages ago”. I called him an ash-hole immediately, then he pointed out the conversations he was having with his colleagues, who all work in a pet-friendly office, which included the hypocrisy of species-ism and just the fact that by abstaining from meat, he was practicing self-control when others just couldn’t. It comes down to two things:
Species-ism - my brother called it animal racism. But he is right, how can someone love their puppies and kittens so much they would die for them yet have a complete disregard for the lives of cows and pigs, who are known to be as affectionate and smart as traditional pet species. The argument that the animals we eat are dumb has been proven wrong over and over again. The argument that they do not have emotions has been caught on video multiple times where moms hide their babies or jump off moving vehicles to escape death. They feel as much as we do, just because we do not speak their language does not mean they are dumb. We just prefer to separate and ignore their suffering so we can indulge on their flesh.
Self-Control - my brother being the ash-hole he is, also likes to challenge people and push peoples’ buttons. And what it comes down to when choosing to eat plant-based is self-control. That is why plant-eaters are always challenged by conventional eaters, we make them question one of the most important daily actions we humans partake in, their choice of food. Meat eaters tend to put this on themselves more than they think we do, that we are judging them for choosing to eat animals. With all the information about how much better it is to reduce your animal intake, most people know that it is better to eat more whole grains and vegetables; I am not even saying to go vegan, it is about eating animals where you can make an informed decision about where they are come from and how they were taken care of. There are arguments that support eating from regenerative, close looped farms that prove better than going vegan.
The word “empowerful” is not my creation. I first saw it on a Miir Bottle, who also hosted a podcast of the same name; old content but still good content. Empowerful is a combination of feeling empowered and powerful. Wouldn’t you like to feel like this?
There are two ways that I see the world. I believe that right now, the people who are still using plastic cups and bags and straws and eating animals indiscriminately, they just do not know better. But on the opposite end of things, I also think that people are lazy ash-holes who chose to be ignorant or actively choose to not change when they know better, the latter being the absolute worst type of Earthling. Either way, at the end of the day, we are overwhelmed by contradictory information, we do not have the time to look into every single aspect of sustainability to gain a full understanding, and whether or not we realise it, we all feel like we have lost control of things, disempowered.
So how do you even start to feel not hopeless about the future? How do you even start to feel you as an individual you can make a difference? Why should we even be bothering? Why give a cluck?
If you take the time to explore giveacluckxyz, I hope you click away feeling “empowerful” about your presence here on our blue marble, your importance as an inhabitant of the planet, and the power you have as one human.
I want you to click away from the website knowing a little bit more about the existential problems we are facing, that it is not hopeless, and that by consciously choosing to be better every step of the way, you are making more of a difference than you think.
I leave you with two quotes:
Paul Watson believes that “all social change comes from the passion and intervention of individuals or small groups of individuals". And Jane Goodall says “you cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make. Every individual matters. Every individual has a role to play.”
*My brother is a computer engineer so he is already in that breed of humans who think they are just a little bit more special than the rest of us; to be fair if they all decided to use their powers for evil, they could bring down to whole internet and therefore the planet.
