{"id":84,"date":"2005-09-01T14:38:03","date_gmt":"2005-09-01T19:38:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bayareaveg.org\/wordpress\/mat-thomas\/"},"modified":"2005-09-01T14:38:03","modified_gmt":"2005-09-01T19:38:03","slug":"mat-thomas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bayareaveg.org\/blog\/2005\/09\/01\/mat-thomas\/","title":{"rendered":"Mat Thomas<\/a>"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Mat<\/p>\n

Struggling with being vegan? Or finding your advocacy niche? Learn how Mat Thomas discovered his inner vegan strengths.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Name:<\/strong> Mat Thomas
\nProfession:<\/strong> writer\/editor
\nCity:<\/strong> San Francisco<\/p>\n

Age:<\/strong> 35
\nWebsite:<\/strong> www.idausa.org<\/a><\/p>\n

How long I have been vegetarian\/vegan:<\/strong>
\nI’ve been vegetarian 9 years, vegan for 3½ years. <\/p>\n

What motivated me to make this change:<\/strong><\/p>\n

I became a vegetarian soon after moving from New York to California: it was a time of major transition for me, and I was wide open to new experiences. I was attending grad school, studying to be a transpersonal psychotherapist, and was assigned to read an interview with John Robbins for a class called Paradigms of Consciousness. I became a vegetarian that day, in July 1996. <\/p>\n

Over the next few years, I tried going vegan many times, but I didn’t meet any vegans until I’d already been vegetarian for five years, so change was difficult. I was working as a business proposal writer for a managed behavioral healthcare company, occupying a cubicle in a Financial District skyscraper, when I met my first two vegans (out of 2,500 employees). We’d been going to dinner Friday nights, and their influence facilitated my transformation from conflicted vegetarian into empowered vegan. <\/p>\n

Becoming a vegan was one of my delayed responses to 9\/11: like many people, I was asking hard questions about the meaning of life, and that’s when the change took hold. I became a vegan in February 2002, after eating a cheese omelet that made me nauseous. I said to myself, “That’s it,” and it was: I just knew then that, from that day forward, I was going to be a vegan for the rest of my life. <\/p>\n

How I got started in activism:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Determined to help animals, I began doing activism within weeks of going vegan. Through BAV, I found out what was happening in the Bay Area. I started out by leafleting with other activists (usually accompanied by a TV\/VCR showing factory farming videos) because that seemed like entry-level “activism” to me. After a couple of months of this, I got involved with a local grassroots group that was just starting up at the time called Freedom For Animals (FFA). I hit the streets with them on various campaigns, and wrote some flyers using my background in marketing and psychology. I enjoyed seeing “average folks” actually read what I’d written about factory farming issues, and hopefully making more compassionate choices as a result.<\/p>\n

I did public outreach on and off for more than two years, but decided to stop because the emotions it raised – grief, anguish, rage – were driving me to despair. Ultimately, I found I could be a more effective advocate by focusing my energies on writing. To prosper, activists must do what they find most personally exciting and motivating: for me, that’s working with language. <\/p>\n

The hardest part of being vegan:<\/strong>
\nLiving in a society that engages in a form of speciesist holocaust every moment of every day, and having to interact with those who can’t see the truth or empathize with enslaved animals. The fact is that most non-vegetarians would rather eat the corpse-flesh <\/em>of a factory-farmed animal than read the words I write <\/em>to describe that animal’s life and death! In psychological terms, this widespread disconnect from reality is symptomatic of an undiagnosed emotional disorder of epidemic proportions. Yet, killing and eating animals is the norm, so I strive to attain a higher level of sanity in a world where mass murder is considered natural, acceptable and inevitable. I cope by trying to use my voice to move people toward greater sensitivity.<\/p>\n

What I am working on:<\/strong><\/p>\n