I love listening to other vegan podcasts and reading other vegan website blogs but recently I've noticed about 90% of them, throughout the years, are now gone!
I go to vegan directory links, promising me a list of hundreds of vegan blogs and podcasts, but when I click on to these blog and podcast links, most are dead links or might as well be, as their site has not been updated in months or years!
What happened?? Have these vegans found another way to do their activism? Or, have these vegans become apathetic....maybe becoming a minimalist vegan--just living by example?
A good example of 'Where are they now?' is the activist Erin Red. I used to really like her podcast on iTunes, called Red Radio: Vegan Banter with a Bite. But one day she made this 7-minute "special announcement" on her show, saying she had to take a break from her podcast for personal reasons, that she didn't elaborate on; she said she would probably return in a month.
So far, she is a no-show.
Erin has since said time and time again (at her Twitter account) that she will be returning soon....By the way, her special announcement was made on September 16, 2013--almost a year ago.
I read some of her Tweets and she appear to be enjoying her time spent on Twitter, mixing in silliness with animal rights activism. Erin, at her website, has said she plans to update her vegan/animal rights website/blog but she has not really done that either, but instead she continually posts on her blog these absolutely asinine posts--many having nothing to do with veganism. It's an embarrassment; doesn't she realize this? I guess not.
Also, I have since noticed Erin Red has not been as staunch in her veganism as compared to her early days on the Internet. Something happened to her gravely. She has lost a lot of her activism spirit. Is it burn-out? I don't know, but Erin Red--like many, many vegans--seem to have, for the most part, given up fighting for the vegan cause. It's disheartening and disturbing. The animals--the planet--needs all the support they can get from people! Erin was a real fighter; now it's like she's turned over and is playing dead, like so many other activists.
Whatever these vegan activists are going through--personal tragedies, professional tragedies, apathy, burn-out, or have now become ex-vegans--I hope dramatic things change in their life to make them get back into being the gutsy, loud & proud vegan activists they were when they got into the movement.
We need everyone we can get--for the sake of the animals, for the sake of the people, for the sake of the planet.
