On December 6, 1998, my wife Janna and I began to serve the Vegan lifestyle. I say “serve” because being Vegan can be a lonesome service to a greater cause as everyone around you devours animals and wears their skins.
Janna and I have been faithful as possible to the way of being and eating requirements of Veganism for over a decade, and we look forward to continued service for decades to come.
Some will argue it is impossible to be entirely Vegan. People slip and slurp or cheat eat. People unwittingly eat foods that include animal remains or extractions. People use computers and drive cars — and bits of animals are used to make a lot of electronic equipment.
I agree rigid Veganism is impossible right now — but that doesn’t make me duplicitous or a convenient moralist.
Veganism isn’t about 100% perfection — Veganism is doing the right thing more often than not and always making the correct choice when more than one option is offered. Every day of your life you must actively choose between a Vegan option and something else.
I am not a radical Vegan in that few people know the choice I’ve made. Many Vegans think you need to be “out there” and “in the face” of society and yelling and protesting instead of living right and demonstrating the path of purposefulness by example.
Being Vegan demands a certain quiet comfort in knowing you are doing the right thing without publicity and in private — and that you don’t have to shout from blogs or write in the sky with contrails to make a difference.
Each year it gets easier and easier to be Vegan in the marketplace. Supermarkets are becoming more sensitive to Vegan dietary needs and they are filling their shelves with our food.
Clothing and shoe companies are economically coming around — perhaps they are not ethically bending to the moral will of human compassion — but at least they feel in their bottom line why it is, by far, cheaper to use manufactured materials to make their products than it is to process the remains of a carcass.
Veganism is a friendly, pro-animal, pro-health choice movement that not only makes you feel better physically, it fulfills you emotionally with the notion that each moment of every day you are making a measurable — if infinitesimal — righteous difference in the world that can be felt in situ and known in quantifications that reverberate morally beyond you and that exponentially matter economically.