For today's Quaker class, we read this Pendle Hill pamphlet by David Morse called "John Woolman on Today's Global Economy." Basically, John Woolman was this Quaker dude in the 1700s who wasn't a fan of slavery, and he boycotted slave-made products and traveled around telling other people why slavery was bad. That was super radical for his time. In the pamphlet, Morse uses Woolman's life as a point of comparison to today's world and all the injustices that go on - how would Woolman have responded? (WWWD?)
The clothes you're wearing, unless you got them all from American Apparel or another sweat-free source, were probably made by slave labor or children or under other horrible working conditions in some other country. Seriously. Check the tag. Does it say "Made in the USA"? Didn't think so. My sweatshirt says "Made in Lesotho." I've never even heard of Lesotho and I as a consumer am probably exploiting people there. (It's this one, for the record, one of the ones that's landlocked in the middle of South Africa.) My t-shirt was made in Pakistan, my jeans in China, and my leggings in Latvia. Children weave carpets in Nepal who sleep next to their looms, get no education or medical care, don't eat enough, end up with horrible ailments, and will probably be sexually abused in their lifetime. Where do those carpets end up? In the homes of people who live in the wealtheir parts of the world. (For the sake of academic integrity, I tried to paraphrase but really I just plagiarized a lot of that wording. Page 9, if you're wondering.) Oh, and bananas? Banana pickers in Ecuador are exposed to pesticides, and their union leaders are beaten or they "disappear." So what IS safe for the moral consumer to buy?
Well that's the kicker - we're left in the dark. It's nearly impossible for our "actions [to be] consonant with [our] beliefs" (10). Clearly Morse's words describe this way better: "Today we are invited to sit blindfolded within the box, to feel overwhelmed by the complexity of the world, to experience a paradoxical choicelessness before the glut of information and goods that bombards us daily. How can we restore our own field of moral choice" (19) when everyone is out to make a profit rather instead of paying attention to human rights and fair treatment and sustainability and honesty? The media doesn't report on it, the government doesn't regulate it, and the companies don't tell us what really goes on behind it.
So then he goes on about how we often praise the work of John Woolman or Gandhi or MLK, but we view ourselves as insufficient for that "depth of moral conviction" and "content [ourselves] with lesser goals and lesser degrees of passion." Maybe I could be the next Woolman. In fact I could be if I wanted to be. But realistically I probably won't be, since I'm not about to devote my life to attaining that level of goals and passion. I still plan on functioning within the confines of my society, quite frankly, even if it means not reaching my full moral potential. The question is, what CAN I do? What can I do today or tomorrow, small or big? Morse suggests things like working for non-profits and networking and talking to people, and he says something about "finding God in the supermarket," but I don't get that because he had already said we're denied information about the products we buy. Of course, that left me incredibly frustrated, because I got all worked up and then didn't get any real solutions or answers to my questions.
Here's another good one (last one, I swear): "When we are systematically denied a basis for making moral choices, we are forced to make amoral choices; this knowledge of our own complicity in turn reinforces our apathy, and thus we deny ourselves the possibility of a moral choice" (24). I fear that I fall into this category. I'll probably forget about this pamphlet within a month, even though I hope I don't. I'm so overwhelmed by my desire to end sweatshop labor and profit-focused greed and implement organic-ness and sustainability everywhere.
So then, our homework assignment was to come up with and do, in the next 48 hours, something to improve our moral choices. Something small, since we only have 48 hours. No leading a campus-wide fruit boycott or something drastic. So I cleaned out the brita pitcher in which the water has literally been gathering dust in my fridge (it tasted funny so I left it there to rot), so now I can stop gathering plastic water bottles. I also looked up American Apparel and sweatshop-free products on Google. I was surprised by how much is out there, but EVERYTHING IS SO FREAKING EXPENSIVE! Which it would be, since the whole point of exploiting people is to create cheap enough products to compete in the global marketplace. Which leads me to the conclusion that living a moral lifestyle within the context of the global economy is impossible unless you're privileged enough to be able to regularly afford $250 jackets and $40 leggings and $50 t-shirts. Which leaves me even MORE bitter and helpless-feeling. Why is it so hard?!
the margin of page 21
On a slightly more hopeful note though, John Woolman never saw slavery get abolished. He definitely didn't do all that work for nothing - he just unfortunately never got to see his efforts come to fruition. And for Thursday we have to skim through everything and find our favorite quotes from everything we read in the class, and one of the ones I found from another Pendle Hill pamphlet by Daniel O. Snyder was: "Together we learn to discern the contours of hope, for although we yearn to see and to celebrate the visible results of our work, we dare not anchor hope in the visible results of our work, for we are working toward a future that may be many generation in the making, a future that we may not see in our lifetime, indeed a future that may never exist. We learned that the work itself is our sign of hope ("Quaker Witness as Sacrament" 30). So I guess that's kind of pessimistic and optimistic at the same time - despite the fact that I'm still not entirely sure what I can do, in terms of being overwhelmed by trying to end all evils in the world ASAP, it's just not going to happen in my lifetime and I need to accept that. That doesn't mean I can't or shouldn't work towards improvement so that it might happen in generations to come.
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