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  • sport of sacred spherical cowsbeadsland@beige.party
    Oct 9, 2026, 8:31 AM

    We don't get to say "Yeah, but my personally not participating won't change anything," and wipe our hands of it.

    With respect to your own journey, perhaps this will help you to fully embody. Myself for years brushed off all the standard vegan debate bro arguments for veganism.

    Like, sure, yes, it's bad to eat animals, for any number of reasons, without even asking the question of how it impacts the animals themselves. Enlightened self-interest alone, as inhabitants of a planet being rapidly changed, in significant part, by industrial animal husbandry, should be reason enough to not participate in those systems.

    But as someone who lives subject to those systems, it would just be more difficult to not eat animals or animal by-products. It would require more thought and effort on my part. And that was where my engagement with the issue ended.

    Then 2020 happened, and we learned that chains of transmission, however many steps removed, can kill or disable people we don't even know.

    4/6

    #veganism

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  • sport of sacred spherical cowsbeadsland@beige.party
    Oct 9, 2026, 8:33 AM

    Further, we learned that viruses move through the air, can even hang out in the air for hours after someone shedding them has gone.

    We learned that respirator masks served as effective source control, and that even cloth masks were better than nothing in limiting concentrations that we and others were exposed to.

    Yet, there was resistance. Wearing a mask, and wearing it properly, took more thought and effort.

    We're offered the promise of a vaccine. Do this and you won't have to mask anymore, we're told. Only the vaccine was non-sterilizing. You can (and will) still contract and pass on the virus despite doing your civic duty to get the shot. Protecting ourselves and others wasn't so easy and thoughtless as getting a jab.

    Yet the consensus was to return to normalcy. Folk wanted to get back to the conformity of 2019. Me and my household, we still mask. For a long time, myself carried around so much anger about how society took the thoughtless and easy path.

    5/6

    #CovidIsNotOver

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  • sport of sacred spherical cowsbeadsland@beige.party
    Oct 9, 2026, 8:35 AM

    Yet, this is the very thing myself was doing by continuing to participate in eating animals and animal by-products. In both cases, by doing the thoughtless and easy thing, the thing that is normal, we're implicated in the harms.

    By choosing the thoughtful and more challenging path, the ethical path, we don't stop those harms. We don't get to wave a magic wand and make it "If nobody bought meat" or "If everybody still masked".

    Nonetheless, for myself, my own anger—at how quickly folk chose to pretend an ongoing pandemic was over—revealed myself as a hypocrite.

    Wearing a mask consistently is more work. It requires more thought. Refusing to participate in systems of harm, however many steps removed we may individually be, is never going to be the easy path.

    Nonetheless, if I'm gonna be angry with others for not putting in that work, then I don't get to claim it's too hard for me to put in the work of finding alternatives to eating animals. That was the day myself chose veganism.

    6/6

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