Christians must fight for fair trade

I'm not a poet, not a politician, not an actor, not a student, not an anarchist and don't pick up every fashionable cause that lands within my reach. But I am a Christian. And it is my faith that leads me to have severe reservations about globalization and the lack of fair trade, which seems a likely consequence.
Let me stress, however, that one's position on the issue says nothing about one's particular faith and is no indication of how Christian a person may or may not be. Indifference is surely the only sin in this context, because it is indifference towards one of the most important issues facing the contemporary world.
Nor is this about left and right, labels with which believers are becoming increasingly uncomfortable. Goodness, most of the people who have for generations insisted that small is beautiful have, if anything, been traditionalists and even old style conservatives.
Oddly enough it is members of the conventional left, those who are now so concerned about multilateral agreements, who have long looked to the state, the collective, to solve all of society's problems. They have ignored the family, the community and the individual in the headlong struggle to create their curious utopia. In fact, they have often rejected the very idea of family and community and dismissed it as being reactionary. Strange, then, that they are so surprised when states and corporations become ever more powerful and dictate their own agendas.
It should have been obvious long ago that there is something good and fine about the local and the little. Our own food, our own beer, our own towns, our own customs, our own families. Our own way of life. The contradiction in the left-wing critique of globalization is, as I say, that they have been part of the problem, not part of the solution.
The direct contrary of globalization and universalism is choice and autonomy. The choice, for example, to educate your children how you want to and to think what you want to think. Yet the most vehement opponents of such concepts as educational choice and the right to express unfashionable opinions have been the very people who now lead many of the protests against globalization.
The political right is no better. They tend to believe not that morality should shape the market but that the market should shape morality. The freer the trade the freer the population. A ridiculous idea when working people's wages are pushed lower and lower and corporations become wealthier than any of us thought possible. Freedom is relative. Or, to put in another way, you aren't free when you and your relatives have to go without health care, education and a decent home.
Yet there are groups of people who have eschewed the left-right dynamic and have, in effect, retreated from society so as to advance civilisation. They have bought small farms where they can raise their families and live an alternative, simple life free from the whims of a new world order allegedly promoted at various free-trade jamborees. They would have little in common with most of the protesters.
Indeed they would argue that the men in the suits and the people with the placards are essentially the two sides of the same coin. Matter and anti-matter, thesis and antithesis. "It doesn't really concern us which of those two groups has power," explained one home-schooling, self-sufficient friend. "Both of them are committed to imposing the rule of the minority on the majority. They don't seem to be able to see past the bank statement or the political polemic."
There is also something a little suspicious about some of the most vociferous of the critics of globalization. I don't, really don't, wish to appear cynical, but we have surely heard enough from well-heeled lawyers, mediocre novelists and young actresses. They claim that they want to silence the elites and to let the people speak. They then assemble the same old Canadian cultural elite to make the same old noises.
As Christians, we can be and should be front and centre in the struggle for a fair world economy and a system of fair trade and fair distribution. For me it is part of being pro-life and part of loving Christ Jesus. If this isn't the case, I seem not to understand my Bible and my faith.