Dear Oppressed, Hectored Meat Eaters

 

Dear Oppressed, Hectored Meat Eaters,

I know. It’s been very hard to be you, OHME. I’ve been hearing your complaints and I want to acknowledge them.

I understand that you feel like an oppressed minority with this new breed of uppity vegans cropping up all over the place. God, it must feel like there are more of us every day. We used to be so docile, too. We used to be quiet about being vegan. Not anymore, though. It’s like you took two minutes to heat up a steak burrito in the microwave and in that time, hostile vegans did a land grab. Now we’re in your office, in your classroom, maybe even in your own home. We may even be your boss. It used to be different and not even that long ago. It used to be that vegans knew our place and we just kind of left all you normal people alone to live your life in peace and everything was easy. Yeah, there were always random vegans running around but they were easy to identify with all the bumper stickers on their cars and the dust cloud of nutritional yeast that followed them everywhere. Today’s vegan has gotten good at surreptitiously infiltrating society without setting off too many alarms. I don’t blame you for feeling insecure, OHME. It used to seem like you knew when someone was a vegan but not anymore. This stresses you out and almost makes you want to cover up your bacon tattoos.

Nowadays, the vegans have gotten all high and mighty, too, making you remember that meat comes from animals and all that other stuff that is annoying about vegans. It’s not only that but the world is also changing; sometimes feels like vegans are on the way up and that can only mean that you are on the way down, which sucks for you, OHME. It’s like you are an oppressed class despite the fact that you are, like, 97% of the population and there is literally no one stopping you from eating what you want. Somehow the fact that your oppression is not real makes your perceived subjugation even more painful. No, that doesn’t make any sense but, whatever, I have to work with what I’ve got.

I get it, OHME: you feel you’ve been cruelly punished by those espousing a vegan lifestyle, just as men are tyrannized by women having equal rights and white people by Black Lives Matter. Who is speaking up for those in power these days, anyway? It’s almost as if only the victims of oppression get a voice and you don’t. It is understandable you’d be feeling the urge to rage against the vegan machine, OHME. If we say that, optimistically thinking, vegans are two percent of the worldwide population, this means that vegans are oppressing approximately 2,252,000,000 of you. That’s mean! Let me just give three examples that illustrate how you and those like you feel that you are uniquely persecuted by Big Vegan.

1. Vegan events = discrimination. You can’t just go to a vegan event and expect to eat meat. That’s right: you won’t even find it there. You know what you can expect to eat at a vegan festival? Vegan food. How oppressive is that?! Meanwhile, vegans can go to a normal person’s festival and, you know, eat corn or French fries or whatever. How is that even fair? It’s almost like reverse-anti-veganism or something. This means that your freedom of choice to assemble with meat is discriminated against by a radical, elite minority. Some – perhaps you? – might even call vegans terrorists, terrorizing you by temporarily standing between you and your unfettered access to meat-stuffs. Time for a citizen’s arrest?

2. Vegan friends = discrimination. You are upset that if you have a vegan friend over for dinner, you are expected to cook her vegan food but if you go to her house, she will not reciprocate by feeding you dead animals. Talk about inconsiderate. She refuses to go against her values to accommodate you and this feels unjust, unfair and one-sided even though you preparing vegan food for her involved no such compromise. It’s almost as if you had a domestic violence activist over and you would be expected to not abuse your partner because she was there but she wouldn’t extend the same courtesy to you and allow you to do what you want when you are a guest in her home. How is that equitable? How is that good etiquette? How is that courteous?

3. Vegan weddings = discrimination. Okay, not only are you unlucky enough to know a couple well enough to be invited to their vegan wedding but then you can’t even exercise your freedom of choice to eat meat at it? This is too much: you are, like, literally being held hostage to their radical vegan agenda for a single, entire meal. Yeah, it’s just one meal in a lifetime but, still, it’s like the whole wedding was ruined for you. Talk about selfish, too, making their wedding all about what’s important to them. It’s almost as if the whole wedding wasn’t planned around you at all.

OHME, I understand that you feel the need to re-assert your birthright as a flesh-eater. Maybe it’s time to take a stand against the injustices all these vegans are planning to inflict on you. People are already having parties that are not designed with you in mind. What’s next? Apartheid? An underground railroad shuttling you and your fellow persecuted OHMEs to safe meat zones? Criminalizing cheese?

Or, I don’t know, maybe you could just accept that the world is shifting and understand that maybe everything isn’t about you and that vegans don’t need your permission for creating a better world? That’s what I’m leaning toward, OHME.   

All the best,

Marla