Almostgotit.com

Being unemployed has certainly changed the way I see just about everything.  But this week I have been learning a lesson about handling my own passions about exploitation, etc. etc., in a healthier manner, and my teacher has been my very own, 10-year-old daughter.

My family recently went to see the movie, Amazing Grace. 

While I realize the film takes some liberties with the true story, what captivated both me and my 10-year old daughter (albeit for different reasons!) was how easily societies, and even decent people, can happily live with horrible things like slavery in their midst.  How hard it is to go against our self-interest, especially when doing so will cause us very real hardship.  Then, as now, the moral battle was generally sustained only by the marginal and the very young. (for instance, it became fashionable for idealistic young girls to stop taking sugar in their tea) 

I told my daughter that the tyranny of the status quo is ever the way– and the example I used was the modern chocolate industry, which is indisputably tied up with child slavery.  She was outraged!  Well, of course she was.  The real puzzle is why I haven’t been!  So we looked it up again, together, to be sure we knew the facts.  Here’s some of what we found:

There is a surprising association between chocolate and child labor in the Cote d’Ivoire. Young boys whose ages range from 12 to 16 have been sold into slave labor and are forced to work in cocoa farms in order to harvest the beans, from which chocolate is made, under inhumane conditions and extreme abuse. This West African country is the leading exporter of cocoa beans to the world market. Thus, the existence of slave labor is relevant to the entire international economic community.
– Source:  American University

At a run-down police station in Sikasso, a small town in Mali, the files on missing children are endless. The sad truth is that many have been kidnapped and sold into slavery. The going price is about US$30. The local police chief is in no doubt where the children have gone. “It’s definitely slavery over there,” he said. “The kids have to work so hard they get sick and some even die.” In all, at least 15,000 children are thought to be over in the neighbouring Ivory Coast, producing cocoa which then goes towards making almost half of the world’s chocolate. Many are imprisoned on farms and beaten if they try to escape. Some are under 11 years old.
Source:  BBC News

Talk of the Nation, February 14, 2005 · This Valentine’s Day, Sen. Tom Harkin won’t be giving his wife a box of chocolates — instead, he’ll opt for flowers. He and his colleague, Rep. Eliot Engel, maintain that major U.S. chocolate companies — Nestle, Mars, and Hershey — rely on child slave laborers in the Ivory Coast to get their sweets to supermarket shelves.
Source:  National Public Radio (NPR)

My daughter and I both love chocolate hugely.  But we’ve decided to give up slave chocolate.  I’m not as picky as I should be about other exploitative trade practices, e.g. the coffee trade, but as this one involves the kidnapping, slavery, and abuse (and sometimes the killing of) children, I’m afraid I have to go along with my daughter.  

Good news, though!  Fairtrade and organic chocolate (generally considered also to be slave-free) are pretty widely available, and buying slave-free chocolate is a way to support world-wide reform of the industry.  So eating chocolate is still a GOOD thing!!

 A few days ago, I thought my lesson was how wise and single-minded children can be, to the salvation of those of us who have grown old and complacent — if we are paying attention.

But that was the easy part.

My daughter lost her best friend yesterday (in a horrible scene, one of those absolutely heart-rending things which may or may not last the week).  On their list of irreconcilable differences was that, while the friend was willing to go along with an Anti-Chocolate Crusade for a day or so, the pressures of youth and normality and self-interest soon reasserted themselves.  My daughter became “Goody Two-Shoes” and I became the Mother Who Forgot To Talk About The Consequences Of Being Counter-Cultural.  Face it, no one is going to win a battle against chocolate!  I mean, CHOCOLATE, for God’s sake!  (after all, didn’t I ignore the news myself, first time I read it?)  

So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.  - Revelation 3:15-17

Here’s the harder lesson, little girl.  We do need to take stands on things.  Absolutely.  We even need to tell people that we have done so.  But we also have to learn when to gracefully YIELD.  In this case, my daughter and I need to decide what we will do ourselves – e.g., no more buying slave chocolate – but we also need to decide what we’ll do if, e.g., someone serves  us chocolate?  Gives it to us as a gift?  Sits with us at lunch, eating a Nestle chocolate bar?  Lives in our house with us, even, and tells us we’re silly?

Basically, we have to struggle with this very important question:  under what circumstances must we be absolute in our ideals, and under what circumstances will a little bit of compromise be the better way to further our cause in the long run?  (the movie presented this struggle quite brilliantly, I thought.)  I still believe we all tend to compromise far more than we should.  But if we alienate everyone who might otherwise have been an ally, we won’t accomplish much of anything, and will lose our friends, besides.

I don’t have a good answer for my daughter, but her tears (lots and LOTS of them!) are sobering.  Andnotice to all:  we are not eating slave chocolate any more  — um, except if we are at your house and we can’t avoid it without really hurting your feelings.  And yes, sadly, that includes Hershey bars (her favorite!) and Reeses Peanut Butter Cups (mine!)

The hardest things you’ll ever have to contend with are your own interior critics: They are powerful and noisy, not to mention irrepressible. Anne Lamott calls them her “vinegar-faced ladies;” a friend of mine (who, I should add, NEVER swears) calls them the “FCC”, or “Fucking Critical Committee.” Julia Cameron calls her inner critic “Nigel.” My mother’s voices, when she contemplates putting her paintings in a community exhibit, tell her she’s “showing off.”

My beloved step-aunt-in-law (yes, I really have one of those) calls them her “thugs on a bus.”

You know them perfectly well, don’t you? We all do, these voices that tell us we’re not good enough: the ones that demand, especially if we are women, that we “sit down and shut up.”

I think they are deadly, too, spoken by a thing or things that might even be in league with those immortal terrors that Madeleine L’Engel calls the Echthroi: the shrieking naughts (as in zeroes, or nothings): black holes who want to unname and X the entire cosmos. I call them my “Toad People.”

Most times I try something brave and new (and always when I’m writing,) no matter how freely my hand is moving or how well the work is going, they are always there, cursing in my ears, banging dissonant cymbals in the background, picketing with rude and obscene signs in front of my desk. They perch on the end of my pen and jeer at me. They poke their bony figures in my eyes and jab them at my words even as I’m forming them on the page. “Bad, bad, BAD!” they screech.

While these characters have always been there, recently they’ve been particularly raucous. I think I’ve been making them nervous, carrying on despite their scolding as I never have before. My toad people are well-established after years of residency – apparently, they even have a dental plan and an 80-year mortgage. They seem perfectly confident that they can weather whatever current flight I’m taking, and I must admit I find their confidence deeply disturbing. They have very strong, hairy arms, and seem to believe that if they keep pulling on me hard enough and long enough, I’ll eventually come crashing back down. I worry, sometimes, that they be right!

But then again, here I am, still showing up at the page and still writing. And here is my friend, still looking for a job. There’s my friend recovering from divorce who’s just been accepted as a Ph.D candidate; there’s my mother who’s going to show her paintings anyway. We are all so afraid, and we are all so beautiful. Look at us, though, take a really good look, because here we are. We will not be “X’d”. We keep showing up… not only because it is our God-given right, but because showing up is our God-given obligation.

So: suck a lemon, vinegar ladies. Go jump in a dirty old lake, Nigel. **Note to all toads:** this meeting is adjourned.

Addendum: When I wrote this, I had no idea I had been scooped. Sort of. But it’s an interesting thought that perhaps we’ve both somehow intuited the same archetype: http://www.locksley.com/humor/toad.htm