Dear Andrew,
I enjoyed your article “My Global Footprint”. Yes, it is difficult for any one individual to walk gently on this ball of dirt that is our home. Yes, it is increasingly important to raise consciousness about the global control held by Transnational Corporations. And Yes it is important that each of us heed Gandhi and 'be the change we wish in the world'. I suspect most PR readers, like me, ask themselves daily how to be the change in the face of the Goliath of Corporations Without Borders.
Personally, I try hard to keep my own fatalism restrained. From the time I was a child in the very late 1950's my mother saved every plastic bag, every elastic and gently ushered each house spider out to the garden. My parents gardened, composted and used ecologically friendly detergents for as long as I can remember. I osmosed global economics and environmentalism as I osmosed Matthew 6:19 [sic]. Now half a century later I see the planet almost fully in the clutches of oil companies, banks, auto manufacturers, conglomerates (who move manufacturing/jobs, resources and markets around the world according to where best to lay up their treasure) and telecommunications corporations who can act as apologists and enthusiasts and pacifiers for it all.
Forbes' The Global 2000 Webpage
And I try to keep my own fatalism from mistaking wisdom for an excuse for apathy as I take comfort from Ecclesiastes 1:3-11.
Ecclesiastes:3 What profit has a man from all his labor In which he toils under the sun?4 One generation passes away, and another generation comes; But the earth abides forever.5 The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, And hastens to the place where it arose.6 The wind goes toward the south, And turns around to the north; The wind whirls about continually, And comes again on its circuit.7 All the rivers run into the sea, Yet the sea is not full; To the place from which the rivers come, There they return again.8 All things are full of labor; Man cannot express it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, Nor the ear filled with hearing.9 That which has been is what will be, That which is done is what will be done, And there is nothing new under the sun.10 Is there anything of which it may be said, ” See, this is new”? It has already been in ancient times before us.11 There is no remembrance of former things, Nor will there be any remembrance of things that are to come By those who will come after.
For on fatalist days I am inclined to relinquish all sense of possible action and simply thank god for the impending viral pandemic, hoping enough of us will we wiped off this planet such that nature can restore herself and begin anew.
But other days, a creative urge overtakes me and I try to be the change in my little corner. Last year my ethnobotonist brother returned from Brazil and told me that increasing hectares of Amazon are being mowed down for megafarms to grow soy, (http://www.mongabay.com/news-index/amazon_agriculture1.html ). I was struck by how challenging it is to be a conscious consumer. Red meat=bad and soy=good was suddenly a very shallow analysis of responsible choices. And so I designed a T-shirt and handpainted eleven of them as Christmas gifts:
That was a year ago and I have yet to gather all my T-shirt recipients and go out to a vegatarian restaurant as I had planned. But now I am hatching another T-shift project. On the front I will draw a recycling logo with the words 'The Blue Box is the Opiate of the Masses'. On the back a list of the top 10 environmentally irresponsible companies in Canada.
In 1843 Karl Marx wrote: “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.”
Marx's point is well taken. And as a religious person, it does not seem to me that he is advocating an end to what 'religion' represents to my 'religious' role models:
Contemplation, Compassion and the will of the individual/'religious' community to always choose toward Social Justice.
When my T-shirt sports “The Blue Box is the Opiate of the Masses” it will not be advocating an end to Recycling. The point will be that raising consciousness about walking gently on this earth mandates wide education for the masses about who owns their planet's resources, jobs and markets. Because as we stuff our blue boxes with newspaper and wine bottles we are ritualizing our state as oppressed creatures increasingly fragile on our pillaged planet home. The Blue Box is the sigh of the oppressed creature. Who will call us to pull our heads up out of our Blue Boxes and confront our global economic and ecologic oppressors?
What good was a confessional box or devotional candles if church leaders were cavorting with or cowtowing to landed gentry?
What good is a Blue Box if National Governments are genuflecting to Transnational Corporations and if we as blue box devotees are diverted from the consciousness needed to be the change?
