Various & Sundry: Gnawing on Leftover Knee-Jerk Reactions

Gromit had a good Thanksgiving.

Hello! Have a good Thanksgiving, everyone in the U.S. or American citizens celebrating abroad? How about Black Friday? Or otherwise, a good end of the week? Well, good. I've got a few leftovers all ready for you to take home and eat later. Ready?

If you're in a profession that requires fundraising, here's information that might help you as we enter the race to the end of tax deductible donation season: 5 things charities do that turn off young donors. And, I might add, middle aged donors as well.

While we're on the subject of donations: get that Donate button up on your website!

After posting my very vague thoughts on Black Friday yesterday, I found these articles that challenge my assumptions about the evils of WalMart. (h/t @PeterSuderman on Twitter who wrote Why Black Friday is My Favorite Holiday, also enlightening.)

Meanwhile, to appeal to the lefty-ness part of my nature, I thought this post on the Propaganda of Shared Sacrifice was powerful; and though I haven't finished watching it yet, this conversation between Infusion fave Ta-Nehisi Coates and Chris Hayes about Chris' book The Twilight of the Elites is extremely interesting. I'm going to have to add this book to my reading list.

And to finish up this compilation of Challenges to My Knee-Jerk Reactions, I loved this website for Radi-Aid: Africa for Norway. Set up by various aid organizations in Norway, the website asks, "Imagine if every person in Africa saw the “Africa for Norway”-video, and this was the only information they ever got about Norway. What would they think about Norway?"

What indeed? Watch the video and see what you think:

Thoughts on Black Friday

I don't get Black Friday. I could object to it on moral grounds, I suppose, and post an easy rant on consumerism run amok.

But primarily, I don't understand what motivates people to be part of it. And it occurred to me today that perhaps the better thing to do, rather than wag my finger, is simply to ask: If you go to stores on Black Friday, why? What's the appeal? What do you get out of it?

Is it the very competitive nature of the shopping itself that appeals? Because you know you're being taken advantage of by the stores, right?

Or maybe "taken advantage of" is unfair; they're making money today. You're not beating the house at its own game.

But leaving any question of morality out of it, from a strictly monetary point of view, it doesn't make sense to shop today. There are better times to shop for bargains.

***
On the other side of the equation, I'd like to have a private chat with us moralists for a moment. Again, why? Why do we do this?

Every year we have a little chat with people about the terribleness of Black Friday. I suspect it makes us feel good about ourselves. But you could not pay me to go to one of the big box stores today, much less get up at 4 in the morning to do so.

So how moral am I, really? It's not like I'm not going to shop this holiday season. It's just that I'm mostly going to do it from the comfort of my desk, online, having others do the work of shlepping things to my door.

What do we get out of our little lectures? Do they do anything? How can we actually help?

Do we need to quit talking about it as a moral issue and talk about it as a monetary one? Or do we need to stop and listen first? Or do we need to change ourselves? I genuinely want to know, because I hate seeing this play out year after year.

e.g.: Washington Post article: Wal-Mart union protests fail to deter bargain-seeking crowds on Black Friday

#shrugging Reading Atlas Shrugged with the RNC

I watched the Republican National Convention through the filters of Twitter and blogs, and then I read a little of Atlas Shrugged. And I have to say, it was illuminating to juxtapose the two.

Here's the thing: reading Atlas Shrugged has helped me understand why Obama's line "You didn't build that" touches a very raw nerve in the Republican party. At least in this first part of the book, our heroine Dagny Taggart's whole goal is to build something--a railroad--that everyone around her is trying to stop her from building. And though I find the descriptions of her single-handedly building a railroad with apparently unlimited financial resources on an impossible schedule completely preposterous, the point Rand makes is that you can build it; it's just that the government won't let you.

Last night, I got to the point where the John Galt line has been completed and will run for the first time (chapter 8, if you're wondering). Here's the line that leapt out at me:

"[T]he sight of an achievement was the greatest gift a human being could offer another."

The greatest gift! No wonder the convention highlighted the theme.

More thoughts on this as I continue, but Shrugged has been worth reading so far just for that.

Review: Feed - and vague thoughts on YA dystopias

The other night I finished Feed by MT Anderson, which was a tremendous novel, if highly disturbing. I can't remember how I first heard about it, but it was already on my pile from the library when NPR published its list of top 100 YA novels (where it ranks as number 88).

It was a quick read, but I wouldn't say it was an easy one. It's an Aldous Huxley dystopia, a la Brave New World, in which control is acquired through pleasure rather than repression.

In the highly believable world Feed creates, at every moment the feed implanted in your brain from childhood is selling you things, gathering data on what you purchase to further discern your demographic, and selling you more based on that information. Each chapter ends with some of the ads coming through on the feed, disrupting your own thought processes as you watch clips of pitches of products pass by. It isn't our world, but it is way too easy to imagine a world like that. It was like looking at current society in a distorted and magnifying mirror and realizing the essential parts of you were still being reflected in it.

I looked up MT Anderson as I was reading the book and can't say I was super surprised to learn that his mother is an Episcopal priest. You know he was steeped in something when you get a sentence like this:

The sun was rising over foreign countries, and underwear was cheap, and there were new techniques to reconfigure pecs, abs, and nipples, and the President of the United States was certain of the future, and at Weatherbee & Crotch there was a sale banner and nice rugby shirts and there were pictures of freckled prep-school boys and girls in chinos playing on the beach and dry humping in the eel grass, and as I fell asleep, the feed murmured to me again and again: All shall be well...and all shall be well...and all manner of things shall be well.

In Feed, people young and old are lulled, mollified, and plied with treats. Contrast this with (or compare it to) The Hunger Games, another YA dystopian novel, only in The Hunger Games it is want and scarcity that drives the plot, and rather than being entertained, the young protagonists are to be the entertainment.

All of which has got me thinking about how many dystopian novels seem to be geared toward teens. I don't remember this being the case when I was young. Aside from The Lord of the Flies, the dystopias all involved adults--and Lord of the Flies (though we read it in school) wasn't considered a YA novel.

So why is it that there is so much dystopian literature for youth nowadays? Is it because the youth are the ones listening? Or the ones the authors think need to hear it? Or is it because that's the way to sneak this message out there to old and young alike? Because one thing's for darn sure in both Feed and The Hunger Games: the dystopia ain't the young folks' fault.

What's in your wallet?

In my job at the winery, I help with the sales at the end of the morning tour. Yesterday morning, a man wanted three bottles of wine (which isn't unusual) and paid for it with a Visa (also normal). It was the kind of credit card that struck me as odd: a Liberty University-themed credit card.

In case you don't know, Liberty University is the college founded by Jerry Falwell, Training Champions for Christ since 1971. To say it is conservative is perhaps mild. (If you're looking for a terrific book (full stop), I recommend The Unlikely Disciple by Kevin Roose about his year as a student at Liberty.)

At any rate, there I am at the winery with a man paying for his wine with a Liberty University-themed credit card, which was a bit of a stunner.

Now, I'm not saying this is surprising because I expect Liberty University alums to avoid alcohol, though I do. It's more because of all the terrible things the Bible says about charging interest.

This is not a criticism of the man who bought the wine, incidentally. I just wonder why Liberty University would allow itself to have its image placed on a credit card. Apparently, university-themed credit cards are a thing--and not such a good one. According to one source, "those official school cards are almost always a poor choice because of their lousy terms and high interest rates. It seems the colleges are more interested in making money from their credit card deals than protecting their students."

I guess that's why I found that so shocking. At the same time, though, there's something clever about this. If you pull out a credit card to pay for something and are reminded of what you were taught by this university, you might at least give it some thought.

I don't know. I just thought it was odd.

And I thought they looked like that so we could hang them on Christmas trees...

h/t MD who was probably looking for a Christmas Moose.

Various & Sundry, September 16

A quick update on Harper's Cone of Shame: I am now sporting a great many arc-shaped bruises on the back of my calves from where Harper has been ramming me with said cone.  I am also very glad to report that she is no longer wearing said cone.

All right, a few tidbits:

From the world of Social Media, I loved this article listing 5 signs your organization is ready to use social media--and 5 signs it isn't.  The article says it's about healthcare, but I say substitute, oh, church, for example, for healthcare, and it works just as well. (The "it isn't" list is particularly helpful.)

Although for the most part I am feeling some serious 9/11 fatigue, I was still moved by this book of photos that reports on the lives of the now-elderly dogs who took part of the rescue efforts in 2001.

Also in books, I loved this snippet of history about the man behind the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, and Tom Swift, among others. He himself apparently wrote more than 1,300 books.  Now, that's prolific.

I don't know if you heard the story about the three passengers detained after a flight to Detroit because they were "suspiciously" Indian and/or Israeli. Both James Fallows and TaNehisi Coates at The Atlantic had some sharp stuff to say about the incident, which is good because all I have to say is pretty vulgar.

Continuing in this cheerful vein, the Internet Monk asks why people are angry at the poor? I draw attention to this because if we want to change people's attitudes towards the poor, I think it helps to understand what is driving the current attitude.

I found this article about how Whole Foods primes you to shop fascinating--down to what shade of yellow makes a banana most appealing. The author has written a book called Brandwashed that may have to go on my list. Not to buy, though. Why would I want to do that?

Let's pick up the mood a little bit with this report from the World Health Organization, announcing that malaria deaths have declined by almost 40 percent over the last 10 years--and may be zero by 2015, at the time when the Millennium Development Goals are set to expire! Wouldn't that be fabulous? Let's keep that going!

I have a new blog I follow called Confessions of a Funeral Home Director.  He had a great post yesterday asking "Which funeral home wins the title of 'Worst funeral home name ever?'"  It was a tough call.

Finally, get your Kleenex back out to watch this video about Sherrie Gahn's amazing work with the kids at her elementary school:

Have a terrific weekend!

Various and Sundry, February 18

I'm preaching this Sunday at All Saints, San Leandro, and everything I see seems to me to be related to the readings this Sunday, a great set of readings that all, I think, boils down to the verse of the Psalm,

Teach me, O Lord, the way of your statutes
and I shall keep it to the end.

One of my very favorite verses of the Psalms, and the section of Psalm 119 that was used at my ordination to the transitional diaconate. The thing I love is that "it"--the way of the statutes; it's not about each individual law.

ANYWAY, the point is, I keep seeing stuff that reminds me of the readings, or the readings make me look at the stuff I'm seeing through that particular lens. Such as Lionel Deimel's great aphorism, "If God had wanted to give us clear instructions for living, he wouldn’t have given us the Bible." Oh, you can say that again.

Another thing I'm seeing through this lens is both this article and the Ted talk below about what kind of incentives work for people. They are the antithesis of another grand aphorism, "The beatings will continue until morale improves." Can you see how this applies to religious life as well?



In the aid world, there's been a lot of chatter about World Vision distributing the leftover T-shirts from the SuperBowl--the ones that celebrated Pittsburgh's non-existent win. Fascinating stuff, very thought provoking. As Texas In Africa says,

It says something sad about our society's materialism and greed that we can't wait a few days for the NFL to print up accurate t-shirts while not wasting money on printing ones it knows will not be sold. But it says something even sadder when an organization that purports to be engaged in poverty alleviation with a faith-based motive won't tell the NFL "no" when it is asked to do something that actually contributes to the causes of poverty and injustice. It matters if theology motivates your behavior, and that should be reflected in decisions the organization makes about GIK [gifts in kind].

World Vision, I think you can do better.

So can we all. What is the way, not the law?

Really good stuff that other people wrote, October 15

So many this week! So let's start with a picture.

This has been making the rounds, and rightly so. (I first saw it courtesy of Stephen Fry's Twitter feed, of all things, but it's been showing up a lot of places.) I think you can click for a larger image, but if not, go to the link above.

So when you get annoyed when people suspect you are from SOUTHERN California, imagine how an Ethiopian feels when people ask what it's like in South Africa.

My fave Ta-Nehisi Coates asks his readers, "What does it mean among white people to be considered racist?" He is astonished at what he learns from his commenters.

Peacebang posted this link with SHOCKING TRUTHS! about church growth. The ones that shocked me most: Church membership is unimportant; and debt freedom always leads to church decline. Wow! Very provocative.

Frequent commenter Elisabeth has started a blog called Songs of a Soul Journey. I particularly appreciated her entry on Silly Bandz, something I only learned about last week when one of the kids at church was sporting about 6 inches-worth of them on his wrist.

Finally, having consumed a good portion of a red velvet cake this week, I deeply appreciated the new comic/memoir The God of Cake at Hyperbole and a Half. You know you want some cake, don't you, little girl?

All right, but just one piece.

Enjoy!

More on helping

Ajiri Tea won a prize for "Best Packaging" at the World Tea Expo and I'm still struggling with how I feel about that. Struggling because how much of that was a "Look at what the humble natives can do with our help" kind of a thing. And yet I would love to see Ajiri succeed, and the recognition from the World Tea Expo cannot but help.

Here's the info from Ajiri's website:

Ajiri Tea was started with the social mission of creating employment for the people of western Kenya and of educating the local orphans. Through the sale of Ajiri Tea, we hope to create a sustainable cycle of community employment and education. Ajiri means "to employ" in Swahili, the national language of Kenya.

We buy our tea from a tea factory in the Kisii district of Kenya and employ women in Kisii to handcraft the box labels, beads, and twine. All profits are sent back to the community through our donation to the Ajiri Foundation to educate orphans by paying their school fees and purchasing their books and uniforms. By supporting farmers, employing women to create the unique handmade labels on every tea box, and paying school fees for orphans, we hope to make a difference in Kenya today and in the future.

There's just something so...wincingly saccharin about this to me. And how can I be so callous? But there's something about the combination of "orphans" and "handcraft" and "women" and "farmers"--just the whole thing--that makes me squirm. If only they had been orphaned women farmers!

I'm glad these folks are doing this. I really am. It sounds to me like they are doing a lot of good and making some real impact. And yet I am disquieted. Perhaps by the "Let us come and help you" aspect (according to Sarah Vowell in The Wordy Shipmates, this is a long-held American trait). Perhaps it's the confluence of so many liberal buzz-words in one small space. Perhaps it's my own experience, seeing the production of "handcrafts" to play on the pity of folks in the west, all made to spec with supplied materials. I still may buy the tea, but something about this--this kind of helping--doesn't sit right with me.

You know what I think it is? It's the power thing--that I can help you, but you don't have anything that can help me. Even though that may not be what's really going on, that's what it feels like to me. And, of course, the people who founded Ajiri Tea are themselves earning a living this way. Nothing wrong with that. But I think those of us in the helping professions are kidding ourselves when we forget that we owe our livelihood to the people we're trying to help.

Happy Buy Nothing Day

Christmas is coming. Maybe you don't have as much to do as you think.

Culling

I wish I could say this was a Lenten discipline, but it was more a side effect of scheduling. Every year in March the Oakland Museum Women's Board puts on a White Elephant Sale -- actually THE White Elephant Sale, "the biggest, the best and certainly the most enjoyable rummage sale in Northern California." And the way to get in early is to donate!

I thought I had gotten rid of everything I had to be got rid of last year, just before I left for Uganda. But, no! Look at this! This is the back of my car, and it's the second trip I took to donate goods to the WES. Books, clothes, kitchen items, bric-a-brac...Where does it all come from? (You may be noting the problem: I'm donating to the White Elephant Sale in order to get into the White Elephant Sale where I can acquire stuff.)

As I went through my apartment, each time I thought I was being ruthless, I realized I could be more ruthless still. I don't think I was merciless however. There was one item I looked at and asked, "Why am I holding on to this?" and the answer was, "Because I think it's beautiful and it makes me happy." That seems to me to be reason enough. But it amazed me how many things I was holding on to because I thought I should. They were hard to get rid of, but they're (mostly) gone now. I'll be curious to see if I miss them.

Advent Conspiracy and Clement

So I joined the "Advent Conspiracy" group on Facebook and was really surprised when I saw a discussion thread entitled, "Nope. I like presents." The first comment under this discussion was "i like getting presents to much to join this cause." And the second was like unto it: "agreed!!! presents are what christmas is all about!!!!" (And these were not kids either.) Then it descended into a discussion of how this group is communist and/or socialist and how Jesus was or was not communist and/or socialist -- I kid you not!

Today is the feast day of Clement of Alexandria, one of the early church fathers, born in 150 or so. Among other things, he wrote a treatise entitled "Who is the Rich Man that Shall Be Saved?" -- really, a wonderful piece (natch) that I had read before, but seemed particularly apt as I think about what to do about Christmas. As Clement writes, regarding Jesus' command to the rich young ruler, "He does not, as some conceive off-hand, bid him throw away the substance he possessed, and abandon his property; but bids him banish from his soul his notions about wealth, his excitement and morbid feeling about it, the anxieties, which are the thorns of existence, which choke the seed of life."

Clement then goes on to give hypothetical examples of how one could give up one's possessions and still have the morbid feelings that keep one from life: "For although such is the case, one, after ridding himself of the burden of wealth, may none the less have still the lust and desire for money innate and living; and may have abandoned the use of it, but being at once destitute of and desiring what he spent, may doubly grieve both on account of the absence of attendance, and the presence of regret."

Likewise, he posits a person who keeps the wealth and isn't bothered by it: "And how much more beneficial the opposite case, for a man, through possessing a competency, both not himself to be in straits about money, and also to give assistance to those to whom it is requisite so to do!"

The point in either case is not the money but the mind.

Riches, then, which benefit also our neighbours, are not to be thrown away. For they are possessions, inasmuch as they are possessed, and goods, inasmuch as they are useful and provided by God for the use of men; and they lie to our hand, and are put under our power, as material and instruments which are for good use to those who know the instrument. If you use it skilfully, it is skilful; if you are deficient in skill, it is affected by your want of skill, being itself destitute of blame. Such an instrument is wealth. Are you able to make a right use of it? It is subservient to righteousness. Does one make a wrong use of it? It is, on the other hand, a minister of wrong. For its nature is to be subservient, not to rule. That then which of itself has neither good nor evil, being blameless, ought not to be blamed; but that which has the power of using it well and ill, by reason of its possessing voluntary choice. And this is the mind and judgment of man, which has freedom in itself and self-determination in the treatment of what is assigned to it. So let no man destroy wealth, rather than the passions of the soul, which are incompatible with the better use of wealth. So that, becoming virtuous and good, he may be able to make a good use of these riches. The renunciation, then, and selling of all possessions, is to be understood as spoken of the passions of the soul.

I love this! Thank you, Clement. I have more to ponder, but I hope a way to think about what I do.

Advent Conspiracy

Today is the first Sunday of Advent, and a friend posted this video on her Facebook page. It helped me think more about why Buy Nothing Day seems a good thing, but not enough. At any rate, I wanted to share it with you as well. And continue to ponder. Advent is good for that.

I bought something today

Today is, so I've heard, "Buy Nothing Day." I have no objection to this, but then I'm not a shopper at any time, much less on the biggest shopping day of the year. In a way, it's easy for me to support Buy Nothing Day, like it's easy for me to participate in Turn Off Your Television campaigns, or embargoes of shrimp. That's the easy part. The hard part is thinking it through and making it a consistent and comprehensive part of one's life -- the "it" here being any sort of value.

Buying, by itself, is not a value; consumerism is a value, as is abstemiousness. And what drives the buying? What beliefs lie behind our behavior? Which I think is a weakness in some of these programs. To be fair, it's a problem with Lent, too. We give up chocolate, but why? Simply from an overarching sense that Chocolate is BAD?

I'm sure the hope behind all of these fasts is to get us to think beyond the day or season and to change our behaviors. Not just to buy nothing today, but to recognize how much we buy and ask ourselves whether we need to do that or not.

I bought a newspaper today and so I cannot say that I participated in Buy Nothing Day fully, at least not in practice. But I do think that I felt the spirit of the thing as I recognized my purchase and asked myself questions about it. I didn't buy nothing, but for today at least I didn't buy mindlessly.

Starbucks taste and culture

I went to Starbucks today, something I don't normally do, mostly because I don't drink coffee and not because I am so high-minded or anti-corporate as to only purchase locally produced non-globalized products.

In part I went in reaction to an email forwarded on to me promoting an urban legend stating that Starbucks refused to send coffee to troops in Iraq because it refused to support anything to do with the war there. (Ironically, this urban legend was originally attributed to the Oscar Meyer company refusing to send hot dogs to troops.) It makes me mad when corporations are instantly considered to be The Bad Guys--especially given the level of military spending. I'm not sure why Starbucks should donate coffee to troops even if they DID support the war.

But I also wanted some hot chocolate and internet access and I figured both would be available there. I was partly right.

There's T-Mobile wifi access at the local Starbucks, but you have to pay for the privilege to use it. A day pass cost $9.99, which seems outrageous to me. I didn't buy it, but I did take a look at the wifi home page, a very clever arrangement upon which you can a) see the artist whose music is playing in the store at the time and then b) purchase the same on iTunes. How about that for integrated marketing!

I was a little disturbed to find that I already owned two of the songs I heard at Starbucks during the time I was there: Diana Krall sang "Peel me a Grape," and Holly Cole sang "I can see clearly now," songs and singers I like immensely. But what does that suggest about me? About my taste in music? Am I really a Starbucks kind of a person? Or does this suggest that I have a rather homogenized taste in music, bland but palatable to a bulk of the population? Or, to be more arrogant, perhaps this shows that I have good taste, and what's more that Starbucks has good taste in music, too. Certainly that could be possible.

But it was a bit disconcerting to hear such familiar songs in that setting, considering myself out of the mainstream as I do. And even more deeply disturbing to have those songs hawked to me almost instantaneously. And there is a sense that everything is for sale at Starbucks. At least there is for me. So perhaps that urban legend, though it is not based in truth, has some basis in experience.

Another disturbing aspect of the place is how hard it is to get an actual mug out of which to drink, even if you are staying there to drink your beverage. I ordered my peppermint hot chocolate, tall, for here, and the barista asked, "What was that last part again?" For. Here. Ah. And she did pull out a very lovely latte mug, heated it, and then stuck the order on with a specially designed post-it note for the drinks person to make for me. And it was lovely, quite frothy, with little red sprinkles on top of the whipped cream.

But as I looked around the place, I realized I was the only person with an actual cup in my hands; everyone else had disposible items as they sat at their tables, sipping slowly, reading the paper. I would hope that would be one part of the Starbucks corporate culture that could be changed.

There's a lot said about how Starbucks creates community. I'm not so sure. I think it creates something all right, but I'm not sure exactly what it is. I'll have to ponder this some more. Over a cup of tea this time.