1228: Vegan Joy: Joy Is Revolutionary by Vasile Stanescu at Substack.com/@winforanimals

0:00This is PlantBase Briefing. Vegan Joy. Joy is revolutionary by Vasilis Denescu on Substack at Win for Animals. I'm Mary Nerx and host of this curated content plant-based podcast where I narrate articles from experts on plant-based and vegan topics with permission in about 10 minutes or so every Tuesday and I'm pleased to have permission from Vasilis Denescu to share his content. He's an associate professor of communications at Mercer University. He's been vegan for over 20 years and he's been publishing work on effective animal liberation for over a decade. He also is a speaker on many podcasts and webinars. He's spoken many times on the Humane Hoax Project team webinars. I'm a member of the Humane Hoax Project team so I've been privileged to hear him speak many times. So now let's get to today's PlantBase Briefing. Vegan Joy. Joy is revolutionary by Vasilis Denescu on Substack at Win for Animals.

1:03Today I get to be vegan. Today I get to live with my spouse who is vegan. Today I get to raise my son who was growing up vegan. Today I get to fight for animals again. Yesterday I gave a talk about animal liberation in Romania. Today I'm submitting an article on animal liberation to Oxford University Press. On Monday I'll be going on a podcast about animal liberation and this weekend I'll be giving a talk at a law school about animal liberation. When I wake in the morning my first thought is animal liberation. When I go to bed at night my very last thought is about my son but the one right before that is also about animal liberation. Today I get to be vegan. I'm not naive, I'm not unaware. I've been vegan for over 20 years and vegetarian before that. All I do is work on animal liberation. I know all the things you already know. I've seen all the videos you've seen. As I tell my students on the first day of my animal studies class, drop this class.

2:07Trust me, drop this class. You do not want to know what I know. I do not want to know what I know. No one wants to know what I know. So how then can I talk about vegan joy? Because vegan joy is how we win. I used to have a counter at my desk that showed the number of animals killed every day. Did it help me fight for animals? No, it shut me down. It burned me out. I tried to escape from reality. It was when I began focusing on vegan joy, on winning, on a single question, how can we win that I became productive in a way I had never been before. Each second of each day is a chance to move closer to winning. I am motivated and fulfilled in a way I never was, not for a single second, when I was watching earthlings on repeat. Today I get to be vegan. No one, no one can ever make me eat meat, no matter how hard they try, no matter what they do, they will fail.

3:09No one can take away my ability to live my values, to fight for my values, or to help change the world into what I want it to be. It has also changed how I see other vegans. Every vegan is my comrade, something deeper and richer than friendship, than romantic love, than even family. It is what so many people are searching for, but cannot find, a shared purpose. You and I are fighting together for the same thing. Your win is my win. Your victory is my victory. Your success is always my success, because both of us are fighting for animal liberation. There are all these articles and discussions about veganism and mental health, but my question to others is this, do the people who eat meat look all that happy to you? There's a story of thought experiment I teach in most of my classes, the ones who walk away from omelas. It was written by a vegetarian. In this story there's a utopia with one secret, a single small child kept in a cage,

4:10healthy, tortured every day for the sake of everyone else's happiness. Every citizen must learn this secret and decide whether to stay or to leave. When I teach it, my students always say that this is not in fact a utopia, that they could never be happy pretending to forget what they know, and there are always some students who say, I would not stay and I would not just walk away, I would free that child. That is us. All of us have three options, we can keep eating meat and try to pretend we do not know what we know while animals suffer in cages, we can quote-unquote walk away by being personally vegan but still know that animals are suffering, or we can go beyond both options and free them. I am neither a welfareist nor an abolitionist, I am a liberationist, and I will never stop until all the animals are free. I've already told you how I start every class I teach on animals, drop this class. To end the sub-stack, I will end it how I end every class.

5:12I do not want you to go vegan, that is not what I want. What I want, what I've wanted since I was nine years old and first learned what was actually happening to animals, is to be wrong, to be lied to, to be tricked by big vegan, for animals to already be free. But I cannot have what I want because that is not reality. So we, all of us, have to settle for the second best thing, which is to change it. Learning to find joy even while I grieve, finding community, loving one another because we know what each of us is going through, loving one another because we are in a shared struggle together, feeling the joy of coming together, of having purpose, of acting, of fighting for the most important issue there is, of actually changing it, finding vegan joy, that is how we win. And we are already winning. You just listened to Vegan Joy, Joy is revolutionary, by Vasileste and Esquieu on sub-stack at win

6:12for animals. And I'm your host, Maryne Erickson, wow, so powerful. I think I'm going to reread or re-listen to this whenever I need some motivation because this is just absolutely beautiful, there's nothing more important to me than freeing these defenseless, innocent babies being tortured in unbelievable numbers for absolutely no reason at all, other than people's taste, pleasure, or habits, it's unfathomable. And I mentioned in the intro that I'm part of the Humane Hoax project team and we have an online webinar next Tuesday, March 17th from 1 to 3.30 p.m. Eastern, Vasileste is not speaking this time, but we do have a panel of three amazing speakers, Leo Wilborn from In Defense of Animals, Dr. Faraz Harcini from Allied Scholars for Animal Protection, and Leila Kasam, PhD from Project Phoenix. These wonderful speakers will be talking about humane labels and myths and fabrications

7:17and farming animals, cage-free eggs, and some of these things that are supposed to make us feel better about our purchases, but is it really possible to farm animals in a kind way, hint no, but tune in or register and you can get the recordings for free, you can find the information at humanehoax.org. So please share this episode with anyone who might benefit and thanks for listening.