the simple way: petition for green space

dear all,

some of you may have heard on the news that a large fire burned down an abandoned factory and a surrounding 8 or 9 houses in the kensington area in philadelphia.

my friend (and perhaps your friend too) has been involved with the simple way, a grassroots christian nonprofit in the area. (some of you may know the founder of the organization shane claiborne, author of "the irresistible revolution"). the "staff" of this nonprofit work part-time jobs elsewhere and spend rest of their time devoted to the neighborhood, doing stuff like after school programs and community gardens. (one of their two houses was actually burned down in the fire).

the simple way, along with the neighborhood is currently petitioning the government to turn the area where the factory once stood into a park for the neighbourhood. there is no green space in the area for kids to play in.

please consider signing it!

their petition as well as additional information and links to philadelphia inquirer news articles are available at their website.

regards,
your friendly neighborhood blogger

i like this website

Houtlust is a blog that regular posts nonprofit advertising and social campaigning ads that are particularly outstanding.

A recent favourite: Basics for a New Home, a spoof series on Louis (or is it Luis?) Vuitton handbag ads.

p.s.

oh by the way, I also got engaged.
several months ago in fact.

a liberal helping of change

Thus, the people who are the public voice of American liberalism rarely have any real connection to the ordinary working people whose interests they putatively champion. They tend instead to be well-off, college-educated yuppies from California or the East Coast, and hard as they try to worry about food stamps or veterans’ rights or securing federal assistance for heating oil bills, they invariably gravitate instead to things that actually matter to them – like the slick Al Gore documentary on global warming.

...

“Unfortunately, today, when you talk about the ‘American left,’” he says, “as often as not you’re talking about wealthy folks who are concerned about the environment (which is enormously important) who are concerned about women’s rights (which are enormously important) and who are concerned about gay rights (which are enormously important).

“But you’re not really referring to millions of workers who have lost their jobs because of disastrous trade agreements,” he says. “You’re not talking about waitresses who are working for four bucks an hour.” As often as not, he says, you’re talking about “sophisticated people who have money.”

...

A hell of a lot of what the left does these days is tediously lecture middle America about how wrong it is, loudly snorting at a stubbornly unchanging litany of Republican villains. There’s a weirdly indulgent tone to all of this Bush-bashing that goes on in lefty media, a tone that’s not only annoyingly predictable in its pervasiveness, but a turnoff to people who might have tuned in to that channel in search of something else.

...

Rich liberals protesting the establishment is absurd because they are the establishment; they’re just too embarrassed to admit it. When they start embracing their position of privilege and taking responsibility for the power they already have – striving to be the leaders of society they actually are, instead of playing at being aggrieved subjects – they’ll come across as wise and patriotic citizens, not like the terminally adolescent buffoons trapped in a corny sixties daydream they often seem to be now.

~ excerpts from the article The American Left's Silly Victim Complex by Matt Taibbi on Adbusters

~

This articles touches upon alot of what annoys me about "liberals" in contemporary American culture. It's quite cool and trendy to be liberal, and sometimes I'm tempted to call myself one. But I try to remind myself, that at the end of the day, regardless what I call myself, I am in a position of amazing privilege in this world. I am part of the establishment. I am part of the problem as much as I can potentially be part of the solution.

~

When we were done, I started wondering if we had accomplished anything. I started wondering whether we could actually change the world. I mean, of course we could -- we could change our buying habits, elect socially conscious representatives and that sort of thing, but I honestly don't believe we will be solving the greater human conflict with our efforts. The problem is not a certain type of legislation or even a certain politician; the problem is the same that it has always been.

I am the problem.

I think every conscious person, every person who is awake to the functioning principles within his reality, has a moment where he stops blaming the problems in the world on group think, on humanity and authority, and starts to face himself. The problem is not out there; the problem is the needy beast of a thing that lives in my chest.

The thing I realized on the day we protested, was that it did me no good to protest America's responsibility in global poverty when I wasn't even giving money to my church, which has a terrific homeless ministry.

I tried to get my head around this idea, this idea that the problem of the universe lives within me. I can't think of anything more progressive than the embrace of this fundamental idea.

~ Donald Miller on leaving a protest against a World Bank meeting in Blue like Jazz

A man on a park bench in Rittenhouse Square spoke to me in a soft gentle voice today. He mentioned something about wanting to buy something at WaWa. I wasn't listening very closely. I don't like giving money. I don't like changing my plans for others. So I walked away, without hearing the rest of what he had to say. Heart hardened. No, not even hardened, just dead.

making money matter more

(RED)

Because of some reading I was doing today on the (RED) campaign, I stumbled across Gap Inc.'s social responsibility page, which is full of fancy smooth language about their efforts in improving factory conditions. I'm wondering what to make of it, since most of the language is so vague I'm suspecting it's full of crap. (Check out what's written about the Gap at Responsible Shopper: http://www.coopamerica.org/programs/rs/profile.cfm?id=229)

There's a website/non-profit called Buy Less Crap that criticizes the (RED) campaign, which if I'm not mistaken, designates certain consumer items with RED, indicating that proceeds from the purchase of that item will be donated towards combating AIDS in Africa and other causes. Various news sources have highlighted the fact that more money was spent on these advertising campaigns than actually donated. However, other bloggers have indicated that there are residual effects from this campaign that are positive-- raising awareness of AIDS in Africa and increasing the connection between sales and corporate social responsibility.

So who knows whether Gap Inc. is honestly pursuing social responsibility or whether it's a slick cover-up of a really despairing truth or whether it's just another corporate strategy to sell more stuff? I don't think Dov Charney of American Apparel actually cares very much about social responsibility. I think he just found a good way to distinguish his line of clothing and make money. And philanthropy is an industry that sells moral feel-good and social status, but in the end, it funnels money to a variety of good causes. Perhaps in this broken world, we can't avoid broken ways altogether.*

If being socially responsible really means greater profits, then corporations will pursue that route and perhaps there will be some benefits to our society. So to some degree, I appreciate the fact that Gap Inc. is atleast trying to be vaguely "socially responsible" (let's be honest though-- minimum wage in Thailand isn't much), even if it may be more publicity than truth. It's a step in the right direction. *

But for us as consumers, we have to be careful that we don't just believe what the marketers say. We have to investigate deeper than some company's social responsibility website. And for us as individuals with agency, to remember Buy (Less) Crap's open invitation "Join us in rejecting the ti(RED) notion that shopping is a reasonable response to human suffering". Believe it or not, it's more effective to give money to a good cause directly than it is to give it indirectly via (RED).

*Though how do we go forward acknowledging the good that broken ways achieve, while still striving for better ways to do more good?


** All that being said, even if Gap Inc. were producing their clothing ethically, I don't particularly feel the urge to rush back into those store doors and start shopping. It's relieving to have an easy reason to say no to a store. My sweatshop-free year (it's almost been a year) may not have freed many indentured servants laboring in garment factories, but it's certainly helped free me a bit from the constant desire of wanting more, and is teaching me how to be content with what I have.
*** In the meantime, I've recently found a few garments in Zara produced in Cambodia, so their entire "stream-lined in Spain" doesn't seem to hold true. I'm disappointed.

touchy subject

Being a financial analyst by occupation and a writer/reader at heart, I usually work with the substances that cannot be touched. Abstract numbers, thoughts and ideas, shuttling back and forth from computer screen to paper to words. It is work that I have to continuously interpret to others, with more words, in order to explain its value. Sometimes, it's just so refreshing to just be able to hold something in my hands and not feel obliged to say anything at all.

Tom Wolfe, in his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, illustrates the simplicity and the intrinsic value of working with the tangible. Sherman McCoy is a hotshot bond salesman at one of the top investment banks in New York, but struggles to tell his daughter Campbell exactly what he does*:

"Daddy... what do you do?"
What did he do?
"Do? What do you mean, sweetheart?"
"Well, MacKenzie's daddy makes books, and he has eighty people working for him."
"Oh ho! Eighty people!" said Sherman's father, in the voice he used for small children. "My, my, my!"
Sherman could imagine what the Lion (his father) thought of Garland Reed. Garland had inherited his father's printing business and for ten years had done nothing with it but keep it alive. The "books" he "made" were printing jobs given him by the actual publishers and the products were as likely to be manuals, club rosters, corporate contracts, and annual reports as anything remotely literary. As for the eighty people-- eighty ink-stained wretches was more like it, typesetters, pressmen, and so forth. At the height of his career the Lion had had two hundred Wall Street lawyers under his whip, most of them Ivy League.
"But what do you do?" asked Campbell, now growing impatient. She wanted to get back to MacKenzie to give her report, and something impressive was clearly called for.
"Well, I deal in bonds, sweetheart. I buy them, I sell them, I --"
"What are bonds? What is deal?"
Now his mother began laughing. "You've got to do better than that, Sherman!"
"Well, honey, bonds are -- a bond is -- well, let me see, what's the best way to explain it to you."
"Explain it to me, too, Sherman," said his father. "I must have done 5000 leveraged purchase contracts, and I always fell asleep before I could figure out why anyone wanted the bonds."
"Your grandfather's only joking, honey." He shot his father a sharp look. "A bond is a way of loaning people money. Let's say you want to build a road, and it's not a little road but a big highway, like the highway we took up to Maine last summer. Or you want to build a big hospital. Well, that requires a lot of money, more money than you could ever get by just going to a bank. So what you do is, you issue what are called bonds."
"You build roads and hospitals, Daddy? That's what you do?"
Now both his father and mother started laughing. He gave them openly reproachful looks, which only made them merrier. His wife was smiling with what appeared to be a sympathetic twinkle.
"No, I don't actually build them, sweetheart. I handle the bonds, and the bonds are what make it possible-- "
"You help build them?"
"Well, in a way."
"Which ones?"
"Which ones?"
"You said roads and hospitals."
"Well, not any one specifically."
"The road to Maine?"

Later on, Sherman speaks to his wife who is an interior decorator for rich people.
"Well... atleast you're able to point to something you've done, something tangible, something clear-cut-- Even if it's for people who are shallow and vain, it's something real, something describable, something contributing to simple human satisfaction, no matter how meretricious and temporary, something you can at least explain to your children. I mean, at my company, what on earth do you tell each other you do every day?"

*This a cut excerpt from the novel. A lot of the detail has been eliminated. This is an excellent book by the way- page turner yet also an incredibly incisive social critique of New York in the eighties.
** Another notable quotable from the book: "She was thinking about the way men are in New York. Every time you go out with one, you have to sit there and listen to two or three hours of My Career first."
*** Perhaps these pictures are evidence of my only real achievements during my own New York sojourn.

lost in television

Yesterday, Matt and I finally finished watching three seasons of Lost. We started watching early March, and have been watching through some sixty or so episodes in the last three months.

Though part of me longs to watch more and find out more about the show, the rest of me is relieved that this too is over. I have felt chained to the television for the last three months. It was fun and entertaining at first, an enjoyable activity that Matt and I could share with each other. But soon it became an all too easy and comfortable answer to the question "What should we do together?" And though we would spend hours together, we would feel like we had not spent any quality time together at all, since we had spent those hours staring passively at a television screen.

It was easy to get used to being entertained and letting the hours pass, instead of finding creative ways to spend meaningful time together. It was easy to slip into a mode where television controlled us and not the other way around.

Recently, Ray Bradbury clarified that his novel, Fahrenheit 451, which describes an authoritarian society where books are burned, is not about government censorship, but about the dulling effects of television. The government does not use televisions as a medium of control, but rather the people choose it as an easy opiate. The fireman in the novel says "We give them what they want".

Books require too much work, too much active engagement. Television is an easy answer to all the difficult questions we may have, because it allows us to forget about them and escape into the world of special effects and good-looking actors. And so the books burn.*

I am looking forward to life without a television and without Lost. No longer can I cope with my boredom or loneliness with a flip of a remote control, letting the colours and sounds wash over me. No longer can I forget about my fears and problems by distracting myself with some mediocore tv program. Instead, I might actually be able to find some real solutions.




* More on his website and in an article in the LA Times:.
** And by the way, I actually like Lost alot. I think it's a great show. I just didn't like how it semi-dominated all my free time for three whole months. :P