Response to When the Mountains Tremble, Chapter 3 in Pathologies of Power, and Chapters 10-11 in Environmentalism of the Poor.

        After this week's readings and film, I feel bad. I imagine that is kind of the point. I imagine it would be quite strange for anyone to feel anything less. After all, exploitation and murder are inherently unsettling. On top of feeling unsettled, I am also rather frustrated. I'm frustrated that there doesn't seem to be much I can do to effect change. I want very badly to be able to do something, but so far I feel that the monumental amount of change that would need to occur is somehow beyond any actions I could aspire to.

        So, I wonder, what is one to do? Is it enough to focus energy and effort on the betterment of one thing while ignoring so many other things? Is it insanity to think that I, or anyone, could make that much of an impact? Try typing “help Guatemala” into Google, you'll get “299,000,000 results” in less than a second. The first four pages give results that range from animal welfare charities to every religious sect you could imagine getting involved. Likewise, numerous big aid and charity groups are involved in the region as well. It looks like there are countless ways to try to effect change, but none that hold much promise for big impacts in the near future.

        Over and over it seems clear that the problem is systemic, it is the Western way of life. Our trade relations with other countries have been and continue to be destructive. While “fair trade” initiatives are a desirable have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too kind of solution, they too are gaining ground slowly. The reason for slow moving progress might be simple. It may be that we are struggling with uncomfortable solutions to the uncomfortable reality of global trade. Many such solutions are plainly un-American: eating less beef, driving less, consuming less, paying more for goods, contemplating/researching purchases, etc.

        The unsettling feeling from the documentary and texts seems like a feeling that will need to be held on to for some time, not something that can be quickly sloughed off with some minor change or quick fix. Likewise, this feeling seems to be something that needs to be shared with others. Embarking on a journey to be better citizens of our global economy isn't something that we can do alone, it requires communal effort. For such communal effort we need to take stock of how we shape our rhetoric as we share our discoveries and understanding of the externalities of our ways of life. If we take our unsettled feelings and share them with others, perhaps over time more people will look to ethically oriented economic and environmental business models.

        Maybe someday we will look back to the out-sourced slavery that has prevailed in our lifetimes as something just as barbaric and backwards as the slavery that we cultivated throughout the South some two hundred years ago. Maybe two hundred years from now, these sorts of labor practices will seem just as unimaginable as “owning” another human being.