activate

You make the difference

"This is a defining moment in history, and in each of our lives: an opportunity, and a calling, to be part of an extraordinary movement toward a life-sustaining global community - the Great Turning."

~ David Korten

After seeing the suffering that non human animals undergo, many of us want to do something to end it. Some of us simply want to be healthier. Others of us grasp the devastation of our planet caused by consuming meat, dairy and eggs and want to stop that.

Getting Started

However we come to it, whether for compassion, health or to help the earth’s sustainability (or any of the many other reasons: see~ http://www.goveg.com/theissuesasp), deciding to become vegan is a great place to start. We transform forks and knives from weapons to culinary tools. (See “Links” for assistance in this.) We save the lives of more than 100 animals every year. We begin to heal the body, mind and spirit and rebuild our relationship to the natural world and to other species of animals.

"The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all and incorporated into our common life."

~ Jane Adams

Taking it Further

Once on the vegan path, it is important to become and stay active on behalf of animals (human ones included) by helping to spread the vegan message and encouraging others to do the same. By becoming actively engaged, you can multiply your impact significantly.

Different Levels of Involvement

At PeTA’s website:

goVeg.com/getActive

there’s a list of three different levels of activism with  “dozens of exciting ways for you to get involved.”  In their two excellent essays: “Effective Advocacy: Stealing From the Corporate Playbook” and “Answering Tough Questions About Animal Rights,” they share helpful advice on how to be the best possible advocate. PeTA also sells literature and other materials at PETALiterature.com. (“If money is a problem, please e-mail us and we can send you free materials.”)

Other groups have similar suggestions, for example, Mercy for Animals:

And these from the about.com site:

.Getting Active fordham.jpg

Further, the Animal Rights Movement has written several books designed to guide beginning and well seasoned activists along this meaningful and joyous path. For example:


One of our videos, entitled Activism 101, is a presentation by Marisa Miller and Jasmin Singer. They give some sound advice on, for example, how to avoid burnout, prioritize, stay focused, buddy up, etc.

United We Stand

ROAR! believes that each of the groups working for a different world, a just and sane world, has a unique approach and perspective and something to contribute. We recommend checking out and working with the various groups in whatever ways you can. Sharing ideas and strategies; dialoguing and debating; challenging one another are all ways to move us all ahead. It's only by working together with others that we can truly turn things around. (By ourselves we can move a whole heap of dirt. "Together, we can move mountains!")
Here are several other groups, advocating and working for animals and animal rights:

"What cannot be achieved in one lifetime will happen when one lifetime is joined to another."

 ~ Harold Kushner

In addition, ROAR! is about forming links and joining with other groups working to end war, torture, poverty, starvation, homelessness, unjust prisons, the death penalty, police brutality and all the other horrors resulting from this cruel, exploitative and unjust capitalist system.  

"A revolution is a force against which no power, divine or human, can prevail, and whose nature it is to grow by the very resistance it encounters...the more you repress it, the more you increase its rebound and render its action irresistible … ”

~ Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

We recommend joining with such groups as:

The World Can't Wait
Revolution
Code Pink
United for Peace and Justice
ANSWER Coalition
Free Mumia

"What cannot be achieved in one lifetime will happen when one lifetime is joined to another."

~ Harold Kushner

You may even be able to convince some progressive minded people that the cruelty, brutality and killing involved in consuming meat, dairy and eggs is directly related to all the other injustices perpetrated by this system. Perhaps you can help them see the connections between sexism, racism (age-ism, etc) and … species-ism and how all of these only help to augment Capital’s power over all of us, slowing down our progress towards a liberated society. Perhaps you will be able to convert many to veganism and a lifestyle that doesn’t involve the commodification of sentient beings into products for profit.

"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, focused, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds."

~ Samuel Adams
"We are not required to complete the task of repairing the world, neither are we free to abstain from it." ~ Pirke Avot

We are not alone.  There are so many other conscious beings working towards the liberation of the planet and all its inhabitants. None of us is required to do all the work and accomplish this worthy goal by ourselves. And yet we are not exempt from the necessity and urgency of trying and working with others to strive towards it. Snowflakes are one of nature's most fragile things, but just look at what they can do when they stick together. ~ Vist M. Kelly When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you till it seems you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe, writer (1811-1896)

And finally, the following quotes may be illuminating and inspiring:

"Mass civil disobedience can use rage as a constructive and creative force." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men [and women] who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."

~ Frederick Douglass, ex-slave and orator
“Dare to struggle. Dare to win.” ~ Mao tse-Tung