with my college chaplain...
D Hey Ralph, nobody really takes Jesus seriously. I kinda want to, but I feel isolated.
R What do you mean?
D Like not live the normal capitalist stuff. Francis of Assisi refusing to soak beans from one day to the next. Rich young man, that kind of stuff.
R You're challenging me
D That's not my aim, I feel challenged myself. I was hoping you could clarify. I don't want to wear clothes sewn by kids. I don't want the rat race. I'm just not sure how to adapt the "take not more than one shirt" command in a twenty first century context. Have you got examples?
R Yeah, some of my friends just set up a self-sustaining farm in Alasaka. You know, I don't buy in that "systemic evil" kind of argument.
D I think I do
R No no no... the world doesn't work like that. An honest teacher doing their job is not evil. Fordism, you know: pay the workers enough so they can buy what they produce. That's good.
D But is Fordism still valid? Are we not moving towards an ever greater gap between the rich and the poor? Race to the bottom? Are we just exploiting the developing world? What's your view on development anyway? If we advocate our levels of consumption, we're wrecking the planet.
R Maybe we need to be prepared to lower our consumption levels a bit
D Make affluence history!!! Yay, that's cool.
R You're challenging me
D Sorry, I'm so confused. I was hoping you'd have an answer. What's the modern way to carry just one shirt?
R This is very challenging to me. It's evensong in two minutes, you coming?
D Um, sure, I need that.
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3 comments:
Hey, these coffee dialogue posts are great! I really enjoyed them.
As for the "clothes sewn by kids" bit, many years ago I had a friend tell me that "the blood of little children is on your clothes." I stopped buying clothes after that. Recently, I had the opportunity to say the same thing to another friend and, although she hates me for it, it has changed her patterns of consumption.
Grace and peace (the sooner the better).
Dan, thanks for stopping in there!
Love Robin’s blog and I was lurking on it long before you suggested it. On the topic of clothes, what grieves me most is that it’s not the rich necessarily exploiting sweatshops; they can afford stuff that’s made in Italy. Often, it’s the poor of the first world exploiting the poor of the two-third world. I’m so hurt when I see them stack on cheap shit produced somewhere bad.
As always, I’m a reformist at heart. I support the “social label”. One green label for ecological standards, one blue label for social standards, and then they can get my business. I hope we can pass a law like that soon (though with fricking Sarkozy, that may be hard).
I agree, about the way in which international corporations create a system wherein the poor of the Western world end up exploiting the poor of the two-thirds world. That is why it is never enough for Christians to simply stop shopping at places like Wal-Mart -- what they need to do is start offering the poor alternatives to Wal-Mart. However, for such an alternative to come to fruition, we may well have to journey beyond the boundaries of reformism.
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