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Learning the Human Cost of Our Consumption.

buy prednisone cream A Norwegian newspaper has created a reality show that involves sending three fashion bloggers to Cambodia to work in a Cambodian sweatshop.  This is an effective show for several reasons – the beauty of the young Norwegians, the fact that beautiful women in distress makes for good television, the enjoyment people get from watching spoiled rich people confront something real – but this is sort of like a grown-up, purposeful retooling of a typical Paris Hilton reality show.  The rich always offer the same refrain in their own defense, wen confronted by things like this: “We’re actually doing them a favor, they’d be a lot worse off if those fashion bloggers weren’t promoting consumption all the time.”  Slaveowners in the United States also justified slavery as something good that they were doing for Africans.  The answer to this is that if a close friend of the family is having money trouble, you’re not doing him a favor by taking the opportunity to buy his goods or his labor at thieving prices.  The Golden Rule, applied to employers, reads “Offer to others a job you would like to have yourself.”  Even the dirtiest, least glamorous tasks – cleaning sewers, butchering animals – can be turned into jobs that are worth having and mean something.

http://kaminakapow.com/seamless-crochet-donkey-pattern/?author=s128 And in general, I think it is entirely good that we know the human costs of our consumption.  Sometimes I think this might be a good plan for a system of education: students would have to learn, by briefly participating in, every part of the world economy, and this way learn how we humans feed, clothe, shelter, entertain, and govern ourselves.  We would know then the cost of our consumption, and be able to trace iniquity down its massive trunk all the way to its multitudinous roots touch the soil.

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