Don't Hate, Indoctrinate: Days Three and Four

(The letters of the word "vegan" can be found in the word "evangelist.")

*

When I was in college I dated a girl from Queens. Let’s call her Sarah. Sarah was a few months younger than me and worked in an animal shelter. She liked playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, drinking hard cider, and herpetology. She thought that books were “stupid” and that your and you’re were the same word. She was nice.

After I broke up with her she decided to become a New York City Police Officer. Yes, there was some time that lapsed between our bust up and her decision to enter law enforcement but I still like to say that I drive women to use guns. This is also why I stay in touch with most of the ladies I have knocked boots with, I like to monitor their use of weapons. Needless to say, Sarah and I were still communicating, albeit on a strained level, when she entered the academy.

This is where I learned how cults are formed.

In order to become a police officer you are basically stripped down in a manner that likely resembles diluted Army training. The physical demands are insane. The verbal abuse is the kind that can singe the eyebrows off of your mother‘s face. Sleeping becomes as rare and precious of an experience as finding large bills on the street. Any sexy piercing that you once had that your ladyfriends enjoyed playing with are removed. They reduce you to a softened, malleable oversized embryo with the external features of your previous self and then they build you back up to their industry specific standards.

Sarah and I are no longer in touch.

What does this have to do with veganism? Everything. Over the past two days or so I’ve rounded a sharp corner. At first I believed this was due to hunger, which is sort of like the police academy for my digestive system. I’ve become so glycemically nutso that if you told me that aliens had landed and were shopping at Pioneer Place I would respond that someone should tell them that there is a sale going on at Claire‘s. Just feed me some yogurt. Please.

There are a few people who have become my sergeants in this training regimen, the leaders of this cult of animal free living, the Billy Grahams and Jimmy Swaggarts to my heathen, rotisserie chicken devouring soul. One of these individuals took on a nearly mafia don type of role yesterday, making phone calls and leading me into a conversation so rigorously intellectual and overwhelming that I walked away from it feeling like I had shattered a parietal bone.

Up until this point I have felt a bit like an average idiot who wandered into a Fundamentalist Church just because they thought that shoplifting is “kinda lame.” Well, I’ve been indoctrinated. A little. Praise and malaise share several letters.

This particular apostle talked a bit about the overlap between the straightedge movement and veganism. I was one of those scrappy preteens dying their hair with Manic Panic and sneaking off to go and see Vision of Disorder and Black Train Jack at the Wetlands. I drew big “X”s on my hands every day in the eighth grade. I was never, ever invited to parties, not just ‘cause I was the weird girl but because I was the weird girl who would start smashing full beer bottles in the driveway. (Also the Dave Matthews album that had been in the CD player was suddenly irreparably marred, only to be replaced by Sick of It All’s Scratch the Surface.) Over the course of one conversation the vegan movement stopped being about emo, PBR loving hipsters and started echoing back to something lost but still cherished by me. It was less artifice, more in-your-face. Could veganism really be old school badass?

Not allowing me to sit back and savor my nostalgia, this tattooed Joel Osteen busted out a quote:

If slaughterhouses had glass walls the whole world would be vegetarian.*

There is truth to this. I don’t like the idea of being removed from what I’m eating. I don’t like the idea of hurting things. I certainly couldn’t hunt, nor would I if it were the only way for me to have poultry or meat in my diet. I’ve gone fishing. I’ve thrown back a lot of old socks and some kelp. If it had been something that moved and gaped, well, maybe this little experiment of mine would have been initiated years ago, back when I had steel-toed Doc Martins and my cynicism hadn’t calcified into the bitter, nihilistic ball-turret that rests in the pit of my omnivorous stomach.

My enlightenment wasn’t just through rhetoric. I have found an answer to my question about whether or not any gum is vegan. The answer is Wrigley's. Juicy Fruit is vegan, as are Corn Flakes (thank God…vegan God) and Bac-Os.

The website that I was steered towards is put up by PETA and has several lists of foods I can and will continue to eat guilt-free.
http://www.peta.org/accidentallyVegan/

The giddy, youthful joy I felt the first time I heard Gorilla Biscuits is alive and well. I can get passionate about this month and drop the snarkyness, at least a tiny bit. (Okay, I admit, I won’t drop it, but I’ll stop white-knuckling it.) I finally understand what bothers me about veganism, and it isn’t the vegans. It’s the same as it was in grade school, in high-school, at the first Vans Warped Tour. It’s why I hated MTV. It’s why I didn’t drink until college.

I hate poseurs.

I also hate groups, or rather, I hate the idea of blindly supporting a cause or subscribing to a way of life merely to be a part of a subculture or counterculture movement. All the same, it can rightly be argued that the straightedge kids I rolled with back in the day were just doing the same thing only in a more subverted (and fun) manner; there are only a very, very small number of them left that haven’t gone the way of the bong, the bar, and the broads. Don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t fuck is as high-maintenance as not munching on animal fragments. There’s a reason why trends come and trends go and my view of them hasn‘t changed. Like Ernie Parada sung, “I’d rather not be a part of your arsenal.”

* Quote said by Linda McCartney