my sometimes-skeptical social commentary

Archive for the ‘social justice’ Category

A friend of mine emailed this link to me, after I sent a link to this article to him.

It’s easy not to think of the poor around the world, isn’t it?

Go ahead, click on GlobalRichList.org and find out how your wealth compares to the rest of the world’s poverty.

I’m making every effort NOT to be paralyzed by guilt and stuck on the idea that ‘There’s nothing I can do about it.‘ There’s got to be something.

(oops, my finger got in front of the camera lens)

Lexington Co-Op has all kinds of good chocolate, including the organically grown Equal Exchange brand. I picked up two bars, one labelled “VERY DARK” and one dark with almonds. It is really good chocolate. The very dark chocolate is 71% cacao content. Mmmmmmmmm

I had a great lunch at Lexington Co-Op, too. I put a few scoops of assorted vegetarian, vegan, and meat-based dishes from their hot bar into a cardboard take-out container, grabbed a bottle of unsweetened green tea (its cap is in the photo too) from Honest Tea ( . . . ” such a lonely word . . . ” ), and then grabbed a piece of cake from the cooler, too. I know it sounds like a lot of food. But I like to eat.

But it was also a great lunch because I was with friends. I hadn’t seen R.T. in a while, and he was in town for a short visit, so it was a little reunion with P.D., R.B., and me.

Something about eating vegan, organic, and socially conscious foods at an open-air patio table on Elmwood made me feel conspicuously urban, though.

I spoke to a good friend of mine last night, who made me aware that today marks the deadline the chocolate industry set for itself of putting an end to the use of slave-produced cacao beans for chocolate.

Here’s a quote from an article in the Time magazine about it: …in Cote d’Ivoire, which produces some 40% of the world’s cocoa, tens of thousands of children are forced to work on plantations, many of them in virtual slavery….

More info is online at wikipedia.org: “Of the 200,000 children working in the Ivory Coast cocoa industry, a maximum of 6% (12,000 children) may be victims of human trafficking or slavery.” (Wikipedia links to this article.)

Here’s another article.

And here’s another article.

Today, I’m going to try to find a local store that sells chocolate that is not made from cocoa beans grown by slaves. My friend is asking everyone he knows to buy two such chocolate bars: One to keep, and one to give to someone else, to spread the word about the slave conditions, but also to show people that there are alternatives to slave-made chocolate.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the economy lately. I remember that when I was shopping for my first car, my Dad tried to talk me into buying a US car instead of a Toyota or a Honda, I said that US cars were too expensive. I hope I’ve grown up since then, but I did see a rather persuasive bumper sticker once that said “If we keep buying foreign cars, where will our children work?” Maybe I had to have kids to start getting the bigger picture.

My observation of human nature is that people don’t care about the hidden costs of what they buy or consume, they are interested only in keeping the total at the cash register as low as possible. That’s what pushes small stores out when Wal-Mart is cheaper, and that’s why there are no more automobile factories in Buffalo, and that’s why tech support, electronic product disposal (which releases toxic elements into the air, soil, and water), and just about anything else that can be done overseas is done there instead of here.

It’s human nature to be selfish and keep as much for ourselves as we can. It’s not a political statement–I don’t blame the “liberals” who founded the unions and “bloated the payroll” or the “conservatives” for letting any kind of business practice “as long as it’s profitable” go on and on without regard to the long-term effects. It takes all kinds of selfish people, always shopping for the cheapest price, to push manufacturing and services to the countries with the poorest people. Overseas, the poor are willing to do just about anything to make a living, even work with in polluted conditions that our enlightened (rich) culture doesn’t want to pay to correct.

The reason US-made products are expensive is not just because the unions had the power to pay great wages, or because greedy store owners want to make sure we spend our retirement funds on stuff we don’t need, but because here we have the “luxury” of safety rules, we have environmental protection, we have unemployment and disability insurance so that kids can eat when their dads get hurt on the job, and we try not to send toxic waste downstream so that our cows grow 5 limbs and our kids are born without eyes. The poor in Africa, India, and Asia don’t have that protection–how could they afford it on what we’re paying?

I benefited from the seemingly random selection available in the RedBox DVD vending machine today, which showed me a movie that broke my heart: Trade, starring Kevin Kline and Cesar Ramos. The story is sad and heartwarming at the same time.

The saddest part is the end, where this fact is displayed when the credits come up:

• 50,000 to 100,000 people are brought into the US every year to be forced into sex slavery.

Here is a link to the trailer for the movie.

For more info, go to the Wikipedia page on human trafficking, or read this page on a Pennsylvania government web site.