Vegans: Life and Politics Are Not Two Separate Things.

what do you say to somebody who wants to
want to get involved in action well I had a vegan writing to me a couple months ago asking my advice about doing humanitarian work and that's very parallel and the first thing I said to him what it was well if you're a plumber or a dentist then it's easy for me to give you an answer but if you don't now have a specific skilled trade you've really got to start asking yourself what do you have to offer and then training accordingly so the point is here with humanitarian work with something like working on a refugee camp working with displaced people's if you work in plumbing or if you're a dentist it's immediately obvious what you have to offer to the effort and for most people with veganism now okay if you were already a nutritionist you already have a PhD in nutritional science there are certain options open to you but you know I keep giving these kinds of specific examples because for me that is what it comes down to what if you're a musician well of course you know there's there's a very obvious road ahead of you linked to being a skilled musician or or a professional musician you know but for the rest of us I mean that's ultimately like its it's both the triumph and the tragedy of veganism why am i studying baking in college because I am looking to be able to really offer some of that to offer to offer a platform so I mean different people starting on day one if you've just become vegan different people have different things to contribute to the movement and as I've said I think it's very unlikely that standing in silence like at a protest like a vigil is really what you've got to contribute but then over time when we're looking over the next five years over the next ten years you know you may not be a book publisher now you know it's not like oh I already own a book Oh doesn't take any particular skill you can get involved with publishing books for veganism you know you don't have any particular expertise in animating cartoons but you realize hey you know what like the internet like Netflix is really hungry for content animated children's shows and we can have an animated children's show and no not every episode is going to be like a lecture from Gary Yourofsky veganism but maybe you have a you know a chiller show where it's there as an implicit element of why this exists and maybe you have a rule okay twice a season the moral of the story like once every five episodes the moral the story is going to be related to veganism we're being kind of animals or something where it's worked in from the conceptual stage so that people have an alternative to Batman you know when you're reaching that larger audience you know sir I've actually I've actually known specific people who were successful in the entertainment industry like that who had to had no prior background normal it's when they had kids and realized okay I gotta go into making children show students cartoons you know there's no reason why on day one when you start with veganism you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna see that but um yeah I mean it's it's hard if it were easy I wouldn't have made 1,000 YouTube videos talking about this and and and talking to other people about it veganism is partly an attempt to transform the culture we're living in so that cultural struggle involves things like children's books and cartoons and even you know challenging you know religious authorities and school boards my daughter goes to a school system my own daughter where she's forced to hurt to eat meat that's the school rule is that all children are forced to eat the same lunch yeah standard in French I'm sorry in France yeah yes it's a big deal it's a big struggle struggle and you know if you say that you're Hindu or you say that you're Muslim then they have to make an exception but they don't recognize veganism as a legitimate reason it's it's a real struggle so what do you want to do do you want to get involved in local politics and do that sir but my point here is it's partly a cultural a cultural struggle a struggle for cultural change and then it's partly a struggle for political and institutional change and the two are linked I mean these two are inextricable like partly if you're advocating for your own son or daughter in the school system you know you want to change the culture and attitudes the people in the school system and you're also dealing with with real politics and uh you know the actual written rules and regulations for how this works yeah and sorry but that's that I think that does radicalize a lot of vegans when you have a kid when you start struggling to raise a kid instead of dropping out of the movement I think a lot of people are gonna double down because a kid a kid can't fight back that way you know a kid can't say no we can't stand on point of principle mmm so yeah that's a real question for a future that's very direct and the other one I was mentioned so I mean shout out to the the geriatric started to vegans over 80 vegan retirement homes I mean sir vegan you know those questions of vegan meals and hospitals and I don't I it's really easy in veganism to just be focused on beautiful young people in bikinis that's normally not who makes political change it's normally people over 65 to make political change those people really matter too and we got to reach out to and organize those people because they'll have a lot of the staying power in terms of in terms of making political and cultural change yep okay good closing statement no he says it's really brief on this cuz but this is for me part of the direct answer I went to a vegan event here in Victoria you know a bunch of vegans meet him and you know they each person had ten seconds to introduce themselves hi who are you and you know I knew okay I have a choice here I can say hey I'm the guy who bakes bread I'm going to college and learning about like I'm the vegan baking guy and you know the kind of positive response you're gonna get or I can say I have a degree in political science from the University of Toronto my expertise what I have to offer is really in politics like I know how to do this I know about running campaigns I've been involved in elections for City Council in Toronto have been involved at City Hall in Toronto and I know how negatively that'll be that'll be perceived politics and life are not two separate things you know I know a youtuber I won't name her just to be polite and she was that kind of bikini channel that's what her was she was about bikini and Instagram you know and I think almost all of her followers rather women who wanted to have a body like her or men who wanted to look at like a petabyte like her and you know the real experience of life in life and politics are not two separate things she went to move to Hawaii and take pictures of herself you know looking beautiful in a bikini on a beach in Hawaii and guess what she found the political situation in Hawaii especially for the the native people is really fraud it's really tense it's really she gets dragged into politics and then you're gonna react to that one way or the other no this is my point people in bikinis are people too are they're not I'm not saying they're brainless not saying anything like that but I know like it's easy to say well someone looks at this and says I don't know anything about politics well you do now you went to Hawaii and you found out I mean Hawaii is built on genocide your your turn your move it's on you what do you do from here being in Hawaii is beautiful like it's more beautiful than I could ever put into a video than I could ever put into a caption like that place cannot be embodied through anything that I create but at the same time there's so much darkness there that people just aren't aware of like severe racism like the whole time I was there I just felt like I was did not belong fully which is like I understand because because you were a button yeah just like those local people like have had their land taken from them and like it's being so abused by the tourism industry and like by me being there and by me sharing that I was there I knew that in a way I was contributing to that because how did I find about Hawaii like I found out about Hawaii through social media and I was just like this place means so much to me and I love this place so much that I can't live there like I know that because by me being there like it's not right like this place doesn't belong to me like I feel like Hawaii is my home like I love that place that's taught me so much I literally feel like I was just deprogrammed completely and reborn there but like that's not it and again even like the example of having a kid you can have a vegan who's totally politically disengaged and thinks no I'm happy I just have my own little kitchen I don't get involved thing and so that now you've got a kid and your kid goes to school so these things will motivate you they will they will radicalize you and the reason is the underlying reality is that life and politics are not two separate things they're inextricably bound up with one another