Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Jumping Off the Bandwagon

Reverend Amy Zucker Morgenstern
March 26, 2006
Palo Alto, CA

 

Le monde n'est pas une marchandise. Moi non plus.
(The world is not a commodity. Neither am I.)
—Jose Bove, French dairy farmer and activist

 

Chalice Lighting and Centering

We come together this morning in community to share our thoughts and feelings about life and living in harmony with each other and with the Earth. As we light the chalice, let us reflect how each action we do is a like a ripple on the water, spreading out endlessly over the planet.

Reading:
“What Was Once the Largest Shopping Mall in Northern Ohio Was Built Where There Had Been a Pond I Used to Visit Every Summer Afternoon,” Mary Oliver

Reflection by Worship Associate Florence Haas

 

Reflection: Jumping Off the Bandwagon

You’re moving along and you see one advertisement after another. Tommy Hilfiger, Gap, Old Navy. Where are you? On the highway, speeding past the billboards? No, you’re walking down the sidewalk and the billboards coming at you are people’s shirts. The advertisers didn’t pay for the space — the billboard owners paid to have those ads there.

Some of them are advertising the college they went to, their favorite sports team, or the company they work for. Those aren’t just ads, they’re expressions of pride and interest; and to the extent that they are ads, they’re selling something the billboard-wearer believes in. But what’s going on with the Old Navy t-shirts that do nothing but say, “This t-shirt was made by Old Navy,” in 6-inch-high letters? What are they saying, except “Buy Old Navy”? Do the people wearing them really want other people to buy Old Navy, so much that they’re willing to pay good money to tell them to do it?

It has to be one of the most brilliant marketing strategies ever. At some point, clothing manufacturers arranged things so that we not only jump on the bandwagon when something comes into fashion, but we’ll pay for their advertising directly — and feel like they are giving us something, instead of the other way around.

Consumerism, the preoccupation with buying goods, has its roots in what a natural and pervasive impulse: the pleasure of acquiring new things. Buying things feels good; having new things is a pleasure and adds a bit of excitement to one’s life. Joy and I have bought some furniture recently, and I find myself not only taking inordinate pleasure in possessing it, but pointing it out to friends who come to visit. Showing off my furniture! I ask you! I call it a house tour, and sure, they want to see the house, but I’m also stretching out the excitement of acquisition.

That’s a little unbalanced — it puts a little more emphasis on myself as consumer than I really like.

It’s kind of a nasty thing to call someone, when you think about it: Consumer. One who swallows things up — like that creature in the movie Yellow Submarine, remember it? It has a big snout that it turns on one thing after another, sucking them up with a satisfying slurp. It sucks up everything until the world is colorless and empty, except for itself, and then it sucks up itself.

But if there’s something more dehumanizing than being a mere consumer, it’s being a mere commodity. When we turn ourselves into advertisements, we revel in being a commodity — a part of the economic system that generates wealth for someone else, regardless of whether we respect that person or actually want them to be richer.

Well, of course we generate wealth for other people. We are resources as well as consumers: our labor is a resource, the money we’re willing to put back into the economy through spending and investing is a resource, our talents are a resource. What distinguishes us from resources like oil and coffee, diamonds and coal is that we can reflect and decide. We can be mindful. Like the dairy farmer quoted in your order of service, we can assert our dignity and say “I will not be a commodity, a mere cog in the economic machine. I will buy only what I really want and need, I will sell only what I take pride in selling.”

Instead of jumping on the bandwagon just because it’s speeding by, we can ask, “Do I want to go in the direction it’s going?” And if we realize we’re already on a bandwagon and want to get off, well, we can jump off.

 

Reflection: Web-Based Shopping, part I

This part of my reflections on conscious consumption is called “Web-Based Shopping.” I don’t mean shopping on the web, on the net — I mean shopping IN the web, the web for which we declare our respect in our seventh principle.

Of course, all our shopping takes place in the web. Our existence is interdependent with that of other people, our actions affect them and theirs affect us. Our lives as consumers make this particularly clear. What we buy is available to us because someone else has chosen to make it. Her livelihood comes from our choice to buy it. If she is exploited on the job — paid desperation wages, or given no option but to work in unsafe conditions — we may add to her exploitation by making it profitable for her employer. If we insist on her receiving a fair wage, she prospers. In all these ways, we affect one another’s lives, each of our actions pulling on the string that reverberates all the way to another person’s home, another person’s very body.

Forgetting these connections is what Marx called alienation: regarding ourselves as foreign to the world in which we live, strangers in a strange land, not a part of the whole, but just apart.

I grew up saying grace before meals, and the grace thanked the God who rules the universe for bringing forth bread from the earth. Now when I say grace, I express my gratitude for the earth itself that gives the wheat the minerals it needs, and the sun and rain, that make it grown, and most of all the people who transform earth, sun and rain into something that nourishes me. The man who sows the wheat and harvests it, the people that mill it into flour, the woman who gathers the honey, the family that mixes the ingredients and knows just how long to let the dough rise and just how to bake it, the truck driver who delivers the bread to a store near my home, are all a part of my web. I want to sustain and nourish them as they sustain and nourish me.

The fact that we consume gives us power to affect the whole web. Sometimes consumers have little power. A woman who needs four pairs of sneakers every year for her growing kids, and works at Wal-Mart herself, is going to find it hard to shop anywhere but Wal-Mart. She needs those shoes made by girls in China who get 50 cents a day, and she needs to buy them from the people who keep millions of dollars for themselves while paying the people in their checkout line $5.15 an hour, a wage that keeps them below the poverty level. But those of us who can afford to pay $150 for a pair of sneakers or $30,000 for a car have some choices. The people sewing the Nikes aren’t getting any more than the people sewing the $5 tennis shoes — the extra money we pay doesn’t go to them; it goes to increased profits for the people who are paying them poverty wages. So if we really want to spread health through the web, we can use our buying power to insist on changes that will make a difference to our interdependent brothers and sisters:

• unionization for everyone who wants it
• fair trade practices (buy the fair trade coffee the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee sells!)
• no employment of children
• a CEO: worker compensation ratio that is “merely,” say, 25:1 instead of the 500:1 typical of Fortune 500 companies

If it feels like a drop in the bucket, read a little bit of labor history — it will inspire confidence. Among the unthinkable changes brought about just in the last century were the end (almost) of child labor in this country, the reduction of the work day from 16 hours to 8 (there is current lobbying in Congress to change that back for many workers), and the establishment of safety laws that make even dangerous jobs like mining the safest they have ever been. Decent people who took interdependence as a sacred responsibility made these changes.

We aren’t foreigners here. We are bound to everyone on this earth in a web of interdependence. What we do here affects everyone in the web. We don’t have to settle for hopelessness about the tough life of the person working in the checkout line — we can change it. Let’s do it.

 

Reflection: Web-Based Shopping, part II

The Compact is a group of people named after the pledge they have made: they will buy nothing new. Nothing. What they buy, they will buy used. What they use will be something that has been used before. They have decided, like Mary Oliver, that it is “impossible to believe we need so much / as the world wants us to buy.” They are listening to another world, the one beyond buying and selling, the one where the trillium grows, if we will let it. They’re doing web-based shopping, and the web includes the entire planet and the worlds beyond.

In biology, there are consumers and producers, the terms referring to how animals (consumers) and plants (producers) get their food. But in economics, consumption means production — it means bringing more things into the world, often things that will never deteriorate in a landfill, or things that are so poisonous to life that they can’t go into a landfill, whether they be computer monitors or just the thermometer in your medicine-cabinet.

We all consume, and produce, in the course of our lives. We’re citizens of this planet and are entitled to use up a lifetime’s worth of food, water, air, clothing, and shelter, with some luxuries thrown in. The ecosystem can handle our impact on the earth, just as it can sustain the needs of a creature like a squirrel, and then make use of the squirrel’s body when it dies and goes back to the earth. But there are 6 billion of our species and that takes a toll on the ecosystem. The toll rises when we produce far beyond what we actually need — and here in the United States we routinely do.

Right now, even with recycling, and a worm bin for my compost, I throw out more than I recycle. I become very aware of this each week when I lug the trash to the curb. Recycling itself uses resources, but I’m talking about the stuff I just throw out, the stuff that isn’t accessible as a resource to the world in any way until it rots, which it isn’t likely to do where it’s going. What effect am I having on the interdependent web of all existence of which I am a part?

The people who have made the Compact take into account their effect on the rest of the web when they shop. Sometimes it’s a challenge. Some of the Compact members still have a hard time getting off the consumer treadmill — they shop avidly at thrift stores instead of the mall, still buying things they don’t really need — but they are requiring themselves to be conscious consumers, and they aren’t adding new stuff to the waste stream. After all, it all has to flow somewhere, and when you know, as we do, that you’re in one spot of a web that extends everywhere, you know that that flow runs right through your backyard eventually. There is no “away” to which to throw our stuff.

One person who’d taken the pledge was building raised beds for his garden — a good vegetable garden is a help to sustainability — and he had wood to reuse, but was stymied when it came to nails. A box of nails might not seem like a big deal, but he’d promised not to buy anything new, so he had to get creative. He went to a nearby building site and asked the construction workers for their unused nails. They could only use half a clip in a nail gun and then had to throw out the rest, so they were happy to give him their discards. What a neat solution: the extra nails got used, he got the nails he needed, and the earth didn’t have to try to absorb little bits of galvanized steel that would outlast Western civilization.

The danger of giving an example like this is that it is so extreme that, one, you may laugh, and two, you may feel like it’s so far beyond what you can do that you just give up. But what it is about is not beyond our reach at all. It is about being mindful of our place in the web.

Our religious tradition is all about mindfulness, about thinking and questioning and being aware of how things connect and what they mean. Conscious consumption means simply this: bringing that mindfulness to what we buy. The rest will follow, and then where we used to have a garbage dump, we will cultivate a garden.

Chalice Extinguishing

We extinguish the chalice but not our own lights of compassion and awareness. May we share our light by quietly living our values in the marketplace and in life.