Don’t Feel You Have to be an Expert to Speak Up
The opposite of speaking up is being part of the problem, and no one has time for that shit.
Yesterday, I gave a workshop along with Mariann Sullivan on Animal Rights and Animal Law 101. We presented it for Main Street Vegan Academy, led by the dynamic multihyphenate, Victoria Moran. We’ve presented this workshop for years—first in person, and then since the world blew up, virtually—and each time is a rich experience that brings with it a sense of community and hope. After all, the attendees—all very smart and varied in their chosen professions—are bright and eager to do their part to mainstream veganism.
I wanted to tell you about the three takeaways with which I hope our attendees leave our workshop. They are:
The importance of individual action.
Familiarize yourself with basic animal rights and animal law, but don’t feel you have to be an expert at it or know all the answers to speak up.
Create a vision of how a vegan world would look, even if it seems unlikely. You have to know where you are going if you are ever going to get there.
Regardless of what brings you to this newsletter, I hope you can tweak those takeaways in a way that suits your current advocacy efforts—vegan or otherwise. Focusing on individual action, not feeling you need to be the expert in order to speak up for justice, and creating a vision of the world you want to help create are all important in the fight for multiple kinds of justice. Let’s break that down.
Understand the importance of individual action.
Activism of any kind can feel lonely sometimes. It can feel like we are tap-dancing while no one is watching (which is actually literally what happens with me sometimes … I do tap-dance, and people infrequently watch). And with such big problems looming all around us, going down the road of “what does it matter if just I do something?” can be an easy mindset to fall into.
Believe me, I feel it too sometimes. Especially when I get the blues, I sometimes feel overrun with grief or even helplessness. But I know enough to notice when I get like that, and I do all I can to pull myself out of it by focusing on the importance of individual action.
To me, individual action means: voting with my dollars (which includes being vegan as well as supporting ethical businesses I believe in); speaking up when I observe an injustice (calling people on racist microaggressions, even though it’s uncomfortable; or emailing a clothing business that is size-discriminatory); and doing volunteer work (board work for the Newark LGBTQ Center and advisory board work for several other organizations). Though individual action might mean different things to you, the point is to stay hyperfocused on it … which is basically the opposite of living complacently. (Seriously, fuck complacency.)
Don’t feel you have to be an expert to speak up.
I know it can be intimidating, especially in this day and age of kneejerk reacting, but I’m not really sure how much simpler I can put this: Even if we don’t know the ins and outs of a particular issue (be it trans rights or animal rights), we can (and should) still say something.
There used to be this person I knew who was a brand-new vegan and was completely undone (as so many of us are) when they learned about the horrors inherent in every single kind of animal exploitation—from factory farming to beauty to fabrics. And though they were learning all they could, they weren’t yet an expert (full transparency: I am still learning things about animal rights all the time, even though I’ve been doing this for a long while). Anywho, I remember that someone asked them something about wool, and the person I knew replied, “I don’t know specifics about wool production because I’m just learning, but I know it’s really bad. It’s really bad and I don’t want to be a part of that system.” Point made, point taken.
Create a vision of what the world you want looks like.
It’s important to know our end game, however unlikely we feel it is right now. This is another thing that can feel out of our reach—how on earth do we go from this shitshow to the unicorn-infused wonderland we all dream of?
Doesn’t matter. I mean, it does matter, but don’t pay attention to the details of how we will get there. Have a vision of what the world looks like and work backward from there, doing your part on the day-to-day—even if the efforts are small, for now—and have faith that we’ll get there.
Oh, and make sure to celebrate the small victories along the way (the business that goes vegan, the neighbor that reads the book on antiracism, the family member that gets an electric car after your nudging). That might make the difference between burnout and longevity.
xo,
jazz