Matt Ball - The Animal Activist’s Handbook: Maximizing Our Positive Impact in Today’s World

Matt Ball and Bruce Friedrich

With a Foreword by Ingrid Newkirk

Many people gave us feedback on this project. We'd like to offer special thanks to Eileen Botti, Jon Camp, Steve Kaufman, Gaverick Matheny, Ingrid Newkirk, Lauren Panos, and Debra Probert for their edits and comments on this manuscript; Peter Singer, whose writings have been a continuing source of inspiration and insight; and Martin Rowe for seeing the potential for this book, waiting over a year for the first manuscript, and offering extensive and useful suggestions for improving the original manuscript-if he spent this much time on all of the books he published, he'd need nine lives. Bruce would also like to thank his wife, Alka Chandna, who never tires of insightfully and incisively discussing the topics in this book, and Gracie, the world's most perfect cat-and an excellent reminder that other animals are interesting individuals in their own right. He'd also like to thank everyone at PETA (the best place in the world to "work"), whose competence and dedication keep him sane and inspired. Matt would like to thank Jack Norris, without whom Matt would never have become the activist and person he is today; and, as always, deepest gratitude and love to Anne and Ellen Green.

This book actually started as a collection of writings by Bruce and Matt. The significant efforts of Anne Green and Martin Ball edited these pieces together into what we hope is a coherent whole. For references, links, and more information, please visit animaladvocacybook.com.

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CHAPTER ........................... 1

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CHAPTER 73

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If you have picked this book up, good for you. It can only mean that you care about living a meaningful life, and what can beat that? Nothing!

The odd thing is how so many people are totally oblivious to the possibilities that exist for them, the "go for its" that dangle right there at their fingertips. They never realize how easy it is to have great experiences that you can look back upon and feel good about. Instead, their lives go dashing by, filled with pointless activity and time wasted on purposeless rubbish. These people may only wake up to the fact that they have squandered their years when there are no years left! That's when the adage "better late than never" no longer applies. They are out of here, opportunities lost. No second chance.

The Chinese philosopher Lin Yutan described wisdom as "reality plus idealism plus humor," and that, in turn, describes the authors of this book, Bruce Friedrich and Matt Ball. Their idea of total hell would be to lead that sort of I, Robot or Life of Brian existence, blindly buying whatever advertisers suggest you buy, and doing, thinking, and saying what your parents or friends do and think and say. Matt and Bruce have carefully carved out their lives for themselves.

The authors are real movers and shakers and doers (or, to paraphrase a cartoon I saw recently, they would never let some little thing like not being able to find their pants stand in the way of their dreams). They seize every waking moment and claim it as their own. If someone yelled, "Get a life!" to these guys, each of them could quite honestly reply, without any hesitation or fibbing, "Got one!"

Bruce and Matt made their share of mistakes along the way, but, by spelling them out, they spare you the trouble of making them yourself! Not that there's much harm in making your own, for, as George Bernard Shaw once said, "A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."

One of their many useful suggestions is learning how to connect very easily with countless strangers. Bruce and Matt pretty much started a twenty-first-century revolution by reviving the art of pamphleteering, something that was used to great advantage by the Suffragettes to secure the vote, by Abolitionists to overthrow human slavery, and by every social cause that has existed since horno sapiens learned to print. Pamphleteering deserves some of the credit for the positive changes in the world regarding civil rights, women's rights, disability rights, gay rights, and animal rights. In this book, the authors nail exactly how to do it and how much impact and enjoyment you can have in the process.

When I wrote this foreword, I had just finished putting together One Can Make a Difference, a book of essays about people who have done exciting and positive things with their lives. Whether they are hugely famous-like the Dalai Lama, Paul McCartney, and Russell Simmons-or complete unknowns, every person I chose made the decision to put their voice, their talent, their values, their time, their freedom, their interests, and their heart to good use. The book you are holding in your hand now provides a practical "how to" guide to becoming one of those "ones." If you haven't bought it yet, do. If you have it, don't forget to pass it on when you've read it so that someone else can be a success. As Goethe wrote, "Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute."

In the early 1980s, I saw a report on television that changed my life: footage showing overwhelming starvation and destitutionthe reality for a huge portion of the world's population. As I was assaulted by images of small children with distended stomachs, I was going through confirmation classes to join the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA). My class did a skit on salvation, involving people of various faiths and backgrounds discussing how they had lived their lives. The point of this skit was that salvation is based on how we live our lives, rather than on what we say we believe.

It's often pointed out that our sympathy for others is a function first of family, then community, then nation, and that by the time we get to the world community, it's much harder for us to experience empathy. But my pastor pointed out that Jesus' only comments on salvation appear in Matthew 25, and that Jesus presents salvation as a function of living our lives for those farthest from our family-those for whom our empathy will be least developed. In Jesus' time (before jet airplanes and the concept of a global community), that meant the traveler, the hungry, the homeless, the sick, and the imprisoned-basically those least a part of your family, those regarded by society as outcasts.