April 3, 2004
Put Your Money Where Their Mouths Are
By Nicholas D. Kristof
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/03/opinion/03KRIS.html

Through the discussion of many social, environmental and political issues around our house, one of the first my children actively picked up on was the fact that some of the most actively sought after articles in our popular consumer culture come out of sweatshops running on child labour. Nike became our family’s symbol for the complicitous promotion of this amoral practice and the boycotting of Nike products, the active discussion of the why of the boycotting of Nike products has been carried by my children into their circle of friends and to their schools.

We have often discussed how to react to people who either don’t know about Nike and their manufacturing practices and/or who choose to support “child labour” anyway. My daughter’s biggest challenge came when she saw her physical education teacher sporting a Nike t-shirt one day. Aware of “authority” and “example” and what makes something implicitly okay, my daughter assumed that her teacher simply wasn’t aware and brought the discussion of “how best to let her teacher know without embarassing her too much” to our dinner table. Yes, we have carried the “stop child labour” flame outwards.

And, this March, as part of a computer graphics jury I obstained from voting on entries that were commercials for Nike. I quoted needing to do this for my childrens’ sake as the reason. I told my friend about this. And my friend sent this article back to me.

This article not so quietly argues that not participating in an outcome of bad and amoral (in whoever’s opinion) business practices sometimes directly negatively affects the people supposedly being protected. It argues that naively responding to a symptom without addressing the cause pushes all of us backwards. And, well, yes, I have to admit to understanding that stopping at the first level of a problem is not yet the solution.

This, to me now, is reminiscent of the “make peace and not war” hippie movement in the 60’s and 70’s. There were so many (rightly placed in my opinion) “no”s and/but there weren’t many alternates (things to say “yes” to) proposed. Empty space isn’t incredbly effective. Empty space fills up quickly. And unless we fill it up as consciously as we emptied it out, we will indeed not end up necessarily ahead.

So what is the next step? Well, this article suggests a few and certainly now at our home, we have begun the discussion around how to translate this food for thought into food for bellies.