The Narrow Way
Fraught with peril, ripe with adventureRaising the red flag for e-waste
It’s hard to imagine a world without computers and the deluge of other hi-tech devices that have infiltrated our daily lives.
We now live in a wired world – and everybody’s doing it. Technology captivates us, and a case could be made that Future Shop and Best Buy flyers are more widely read than newspapers.
How thin can flat-screen TVs get? How much faster and more powerful can computer processors become?
We mainly want to know if the latest hi-tech gadgets are in our price range, or available through some minimal payment scheme.
As bad of a ride that consumers can be taken for if they choose to go the in-store credit route, that’s not as bad as how quickly hi-tech devices become obsolete, or how the environment stands to lose in the equation.
There seems to be a disconnect with the ever-changing world of technology and the subsequent rise and environmental scourge of e-waste.
Elizabeth Grossman’s book High Tech Trash explores the toll exacted by technology on the environment. Grossman reveals chemicals that are inherent in electronic devices, a lethal cocktail of mercury, lead, arsenic and cadmium, which pose a risk to human health.
Links have been made with these chemicals and cancer, which should make us think twice about this “out of sight, out of mind” mentality prevalent among the consuming and disposing public.
The Wall Street Journal has called hi-tech trash the world’s fastest and potentially most dangerous waste problem.
The scary implications of the constant replacement and introduction of hi tech gadgets, should cause us to consider the role we play as consumers. The scale of the problem, as evidenced by the sheer numbers of high-tech junk, is staggering.
A report on the Mother Earth News website indicates that in the United States:
- 1 million cellular phones are tossed out each week;
- 50 million computers are replaced each year; and
- 2 billion batteries are used each year.
With ever-changing technology, the accumulation of this junk and need for safe disposal and/or recycling demands our attention.
Those concerned about the deluge of e-waste recommend prolonging the life of old devices, through resale and reuse methods, although that really only delay the inevitable.
What needs to happen is for hard-hitting legislation to be enacted. In the Netherlands, old computers can be turned in to retailers when a new one is bought through a government-imposed initiative.
However, cracks in take-back and recycling initiatives are well documented.
It’s been reported that shiploads of North American e-waste go overseas, so that an old home computer in Elmira, with all its toxins, could be smashed apart by a barefoot-child in India.
Incredibly, the Basel Action Network estimates that 50-80 per cent of the millions of pounds of e-waste generated in the US each year is sent abroad for “recycling.” Communities that take the toxic e-waste often end up with contaminated water supplies and horrible health problems through efforts to salvage re-salable materials.
Regardless of the glaring lack of environmental concern shown by leaders in hi-tech industry, consumers should be aware of the effects that their shopping decisions may have for fellow global villagers, or the implications for our own environment.
Like other trash, garbage of the hi-tech variety has the potential to pollute our land and water, and ultimately take a toll on human health. It then becomes irrational to think we can take an out of sight, out of mind approach, when, no matter how much we’d rather not admit it, so much is stake.
© 2009. Elmira_Independent. All rights reserved.
Inspiring others through extreme challenges
Some people are nuts. You’d have to be to come up with an idea like, “Hey, wouldn’t it be great to run across the Sahara desert!”
Run across the world’s largest sand mass, which stretches nearly 5,000 kilometres from east to west across northern Africa?
Are you kidding.
But people are strange that way.
One guy came up with an idea to get into the Guinness World Book of Records by cycling backwards 60.45 kilometres while playing the violin.
The verdict’s still out on whether or not that 5 hours and 9 minutes of his life was well spent.
Another guy decided it would be a good idea to use a manual typewriter to type all the numbers, in word form, from one to one million.
Seven typewriters, 1,000 ink ribbons, 19,890 pages and 16 years and seven months later, he accomplished the bizarre feat.
The list of crazy, why-would-anyone-do-that? feats is endless.
Running isn’t all that spectacular, but running across some of the world’s most inhabitable terrain certainly adds an interesting dimension to it.
Really, who doesn’t like a challenge?
Oh sure, some of us would prefer trying our luck at Soduko or crossword puzzle, or maybe trying to outwit contestants on Wheel of Fortune or Family Feud.
There’s something rather healthy about a challenge, even if it involves an abnormal amount of risk and personal sacrifice.
This is something runners know and love.
It’s one thing to cross the finish line at the end of marathon.
It’s an entirely different thing to force yourself to put in the months of requisite training to make that moment possible.
But humans are often only limited by the barriers they create for themselves. That’s Canadian Ray Zahab’s take.
Zahab was one of the trio of out-of-the-box thinking guys that was determined to become the first humans to run across the Sahara.
Their story is detailed in the film Running the Sahara.
Zahab was on hand for a screening of the film at the Princess Cinema in Waterloo recently, in which moviegoers got to pick his brain after the credits rolled. The thing that struck me was the normal-guy aura about him.
Sure, it takes something special to run the equivalent of two marathons a day, for 111 days, to run across the Sahara.
But despite his obvious drive and determination to tackle such incredibly difficult challenges, Zahab, one of those super-positive types, is adamant that anybody could do it.
Maybe not everybody can run across the Sahara, but anyone can tackle challenges that would seem extraordinary impossible. And that’s the gist of his message, that plays out in the form of extreme adventures. One of Zahab’s favourite lines is that 90 per cent of such efforts is mental – and so is the other 10 per cent.
For his latest feat, Zahab set a world record travelling by snowshoe to geographic south pole. He uses these feats to raise money for charities, as well as inspire high school students and others with the message that anything is possible.
And hey, if a former pack-a-day smoker can run across the Sahara, what’s to stop anyone of us from accomplishing something equally incredible, whatever that larger-than-ourselves challenge may be.
© 2009. Elmira_Independent. All rights reserved.
The truth shall burden you
It’s commonly thought that the truth will set us free. That may be true, but what about the burden of obligation it puts on us?
Truth doesn’t let us off the hook like ignorance does. All of a sudden we are obligated to respond in certain ways, ways we perhaps would not naturally be inclined to.
It’s a terrible tension, this gap between knowing and not wanting to know and remaining oblivious to the realities around us.
Perhaps this is part of that narrow road we are called to travel down, this path so unlike the one of least resistance. To live in the light of knowing and being known.
THE CALL
First, we should at least unravel a bit of the mystery that lies in the phrase “that narrow road.”
It was uttered by Christ, an alternative to the broad road that most men travel. It is a pathway in which spiritual realities are essential; in which the physical world is not all there is to know.
And yet it is so much more.
It is not a path paved with good intentions, or a mental ascent to a higher power. It is one that demands action and attention to detail.
Stragglers need not apply.
To be sure, the call of Christ is demanding. “If anyone would come after me,” he says, “he must deny himself, take up his cross and follow.” Not the kind of comments we hear from today’s peddlers of cheap grace, salvation sold to those anxious to avoid hellfire and damnation.
But the Call is so much more than a form of “fire insurance,” as some are apt to label it.
It is an invitation to taste the reality of truth not confined by the restrictions of time and space, and most importantly, the fraility of our humanity.
In Christ, we find a mediator between ourselves and God, one who longs for our reponse to this Call to follow.
NEVER MEANT TO BE EASY
However, following Christ is not easy and was never meant to be. We become obligated to act and react in certain ways, always mindful of others and of God. Always ready to reject ignorance as an option.
We must never become narrow minded, content to remain in the comfortable niche we carve out in life, but lacking in critical thinking and holistic Christian living.
We must always press forward, unearthing truth in all facets of life. Exposing lies, corruption, evil and greed, while offering hope in the name of Christ as a light on a hill, as beacon in the darkness.
We cannot remain silent for those without a voice. Indifferent to those who are lost in the shadows. Callous to those who have yet to see.
The truth compels us. It burdens us. It weighs heavy on our hearts and minds — or at least it should. And Christ will help us bear it.
Though ignorance can be bliss, like a boat out at sea in calm waters before a coming storm, it can hide the calamity that’s headed our way. The calamities and casualties of life can’t be avoided. Though you may not see them, they are coming.
The truth it seems, does set us free from the unreality we would rather live in. We become aware of our temporal surroundings, an injust world in which the machinery of government and societal mechanisms — and quite frankly the demands of everyday life – crushes, maims and kills.
We cannot remain blind to the truth, or deaf to Christ’s call. Ignorance is not an option.
© 2009. Chuck Kuepfer. All rights reserved.
Littering and loving God
We all have blood on our hands when it comes to the environment. We’ve spoiled this pristine planet, using and abusing what God has created.
Perhaps the anticipation of a new heaven and a new earth means we don’t need to care. We can exploit our natural resources to our hearts content, and keep our consciences clean by doing as others do — even at the mandate of local government.
To be honest, there is something intrisically wrong with thinking that God doesn’t care about the environment, or that being mindful of “green” causes is a waste of time. We may become annoyed with the extreme factions and dissending voices in the environmentalist camp, or just brush them off as those lost on a cause other than that of Christ.
But we should care, shouldn’t we?
It reminds me of an experience in my late teens, when out with a group of church friends.
And make no mistake about it, these peers were sincere about their faith in Christ, and passionate about following him.
So when one of them rolled the window down while driving down the highway, and chucked a bag of McDonalds garbage into the ditch, I was aghast.
That experience has appalled me even more in recent years, as I try to make sense of the apparent disconnect between loving God and loving his creation.
You could brush the incident off as just the innocence (or is it ignorance?) of youth. But it reveals an all-too-common mode of thinking in the church, among Christ-followers that may believe that love for God trumps all else.
Which is true, really.
I mean the greatest two commandments are love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself.
But I don’t think you can divorce caring for the environment from the loving-God equation. And after all, don’t such actions, such as throwing garbage from a moving vehicle, reveal a lack of respect for not only others (who’d rather drive down a litter-free highway), but for what God has created?
(Besides, wouldn’t you get ticked off if somebody tossed garbage indiscriminately around your house?)
You could further state a case for what garbage and litter strewn over God’s green earth ultimately does: it pollutes.
Now a bag of Big Mac combo leftovers may not turn our waterways into toxic nightmares, but it adds to the overall problem of pollution, a small action in a world chalk full of neglect and contempt for what God has made.
Besides, how can one truly enjoy a sunset framed with trash, or a walk in the forest in which rusted out cars, discarded piles of tires and dog feces mare the landscape?
“The man who believes things are there only by chance cannot give things a real intrinsic value. But for the Christian, there is an intrinsic value. The value of a thing is not in itself autonomously, but because God made it. It deserves this respect as something which was created by God, as man himself has been created by God.”–Francis A. Schaeffer.
I think the keyword in any discussions about the Christian and the environment is r-e-s-p-e-c-t, as Schaeffer eludes to in Pollution And The Death of Man. It’s a pity that he wrote the book in 1970 and precious little has been done since to reverse the earth-abuse trend.
Decades later, while both public and Christian opinion about the environment is shifting and has shifted, we live in a world on the brink of ecological disaster — all of it brought on by man’s choices.
© 2009. Chuck Kuepfer. All rights reserved.
Seal hearts and solidarity
Bleeding hearts everywhere were aghast when our Governor General, Michaelle Jean, helped herself to a taste of raw seal heart while in the northern parts of our wonderful democratic nation.
There’s been plenty of time to mull over last month’s over-killed media incident and all its ghastly glory.
But really, it’s kind of hypocritical to label seal eaters and clubbers as cruel souls, numb to the plight of cute baby seal populations everywhere.
Some people stuff themselves with chicken wings and sweet and sour meat balls, yet sympathize with anti-seal hunt radicals, as if all undomesticated creatures weren’t created equal.
We do have our peculiar preferences when it comes to animal eating.
Heck, they eat dog in some fine eating establishments, at least that’s the story in Russia, where police recently pulled over a vehicle that had 15 skinned dogs in the trunk.
The meat had been sold and served unknowingly as mutton.
Unless you’re a vegan, isn’t bashing the Inuit way of life hypocrisy of the worst kind?
If you salivate over baby beef liver, chicken fingers, barbecue ribs, fish n’ chips and lamb chops, then there’s no way you can point a finger at those whose century-old traditions include eating animals you won’t find on the East Side Mario’s menu.
Whether all animals are equal or not, or edible for that matter, is up for debate, but not our own place in the food chain.
Are we better than seals, or dogs, or yaks or zebras?
Absolutely.
But although their “betters,” we mustn’t use that position to exploit and drive our animal friends to extinction.
And we certainly shouldn’t employ overzealous factory farming methods, in which animals fattened for slaughter are done so with the help of modern science.
Drugging up our soon-to-be-hamburgers, save for the medication necessarily for animal health, is bound to cause us harm irreparable human harm in the long run.
I get why people get turned off meat, ’cause slaughterhouses and butcher shops are miles away the innocence of the fast-food fryer, backyard spit or gourmet grill.
But it’s a radical notion to suggest that our refined tastes are somehow better than, say, the Inuit, the horse-eating French, the sheep-gut eating Scots or the cat-eating Koreans.
In a culture of abundance, we’ve grown accustomed to eating only the parts of animals we really like, especially if they’re breaded and battered just the right way.
What our Governor General did last month wasn’t barbaric, but courageous in the face of the pseudo-ideology that says our way of life is more humane and therefore superior to our less civilized brethren.
Since Jean feasted on raw seal heart, we may assume that we must stand up for the rights of cute, harmless animals, even if we gorge ourselves on the fruits of modern farming practices driven by profit and greed, not conscience.
I wish there were more of us gathered around that seal carcass alongside Jean, in solidarity for a world in which traditional ways of life are honoured, and left-wing drivel about animal rights is treated as nonsensical.
The only thing crazy about what our Governor General did was that she bore the scrutiny of politically-correct drones worldwide.
At least somebody had the heart to do it.
© June 11, 2009. Elmira_Independent. All rights reserved.
A Democratic Blight
There is a growing belief in today’s society that critical thinking is critically lacking.
It would be easy to trace this mental void to our insatiable appetite to be entertained. We are mesmerized by the television, the Internet and glossy magazines. There is perhaps an easy correlation to be found between our tech-savy society and the comfortable lives many of us live, free from oppression and state control.
But let’s be clear about one thing: democracy is not all it’s cracked up to be. This is not to say that democracy is a failed system, but we herald it as the be-all and end-all for the success of others nation. Everybody should be doing it.
Then again, all human systems are bound to be corrupt. Western-style democracy is no different.
We must take the blinders off if we think that Canadian or US-style democracy isn’t rife with problems. Oh sure, it has it’s good points and we’re a whole lot better off than some other nations where corrupt government have run the state amok. However, while we’re preoccupied with our day-to-day struggles, there are those in government and among the corporate elite who are making the rules — and bending them as they please.
Such malpractice is exposed by the likes of Greg Palast, an investigative journalistic who has not only had an inside look at corruption, but is leaned on by whistle-blowers to let the truth be known. (More about him here: http://www.gregpalast.com/about-greg/)
In his book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Palast let’s the facts speak for themselves, and they aren’t pretty. And those facts cast a pall over a democracy that can be bought and fixed in free-election irony. His expose of fudged voter rolls in Florida that ultimately put a president that didn’t win in office, or so he claims, is eye-opening you’re not going to see it on CNN stuff.
Wikipedia’s definition of Democracy: a form of government in which power is held directly or indirectly by citizens under a free electoral system.
Along with voter fraud, there are stories of key political and world leaders bullying nations into privatization of major assets, backroom deals between politicians and corporate elites, and the shady practices of those who take the faithfuls money to invest in personal ventures. It’s disheartening stuff, especially for those who can’t stomach injustice or the thought of the rich getting richer by exploiting the poor and helpless.
THE PROBLEM WITH FACTS
While the book does nothing to shake my faith in mankind (that’s been lost a long time ago), it does underline the importance of truth — and the problem with facts. You see, facts aren’t always pretty. Often times, we’d rather they’d be swept under the carpet or kept in sealed documents out of sight and out of mind.
And I think we owe it to ourselves to seek truth, along with justice, in this world. We cannot ignore the pursuit of truth by turning a blind eye to government, to big business and to those who say one thing, but mean something else — especially as Christians.
I’m not talking about digging up dirt on respectable leaders, or going out of our way to nail a key player. But we must always be in the watch tower, never content to allow those who govern us, lead us or rule over us to have free reign.
Democracy may be far from perfect, but on the same hand so are we. However, we expect basic things such as honesty and integrity in the way we live our lives, and why would we expect anything less from anyone else? Especially if they got our vote and are using our money.
NO DEMOCRACY WITHOUT CHRIST
Of course, it also makes me wonder if democracy is even possible without Christ. Given the success of democracy in the Western world, and the problems it has had elsewhere, the argument has been made that without Christ there can be no democracy.
“Democracy is not a machine that can run by itself. The machine can, for a time, compensate for the inadequacies of the citizenry. But over the long haul, the machine needs mechanics — and mechanics of a certain cast of mind and soul — to make it work such that the machinery serves the ends of human flourishing,” says George Weigel in a speech entitled God and Politics: Thoughts on the Democratic Future.
(More on that here: http://www.europe4christ.net/index.php?id=137)
Within Christianity, we find a call to treat one another in a certain civil way, or as Weigel calls it, the turning of tyrants into democrats. Of course, other belief systems may contain elements of this notion, that treating people in a civil manner is the only successful way to organize a society.
Yet, Christianity asserts that if anyone comes to Christ, they are a new creation. That means death to the old, sinful nature, a nature hell-bent on getting its way, perhaps without personal regard for others. The type of people Christ-followers are called to be goes even deeper than the reformation of selfish behaviours: it attacks the very thought of contempt for others. Which makes the need to treat others in a civil way not just something that’s physical, but also mental. A total respect for ones neighbours.
A country comprised of citizens of this nature would indeed be ideal, the perfect democracy in which equality and free speech would be so much more than a right to ones own primary concerns, and in which governance and integrity would be synonymous.
© 2009 Chuck Kuepfer. All rights reserved.
Guilty by association.. and that’s okay
It’s tempting to fantasize about a real-life “easy button,” the kind you see in a certain office supplier’s commercials, that magically solves life’s problems.
While I can’t speak for others, I’m sure my wife would have appreciated the existence of such a button on a recent trip to the grocery store with our four-year-old.
While the red face of embarrassment had disappeared, she is still haunted by an innocent question brought forward by our youngest to another customer in the checkout line:
“Mommy, is that a man or a woman?”
Now, grocery checkout lines don’t offer much privacy to begin with, with your fruits and vegetables, snacks foods and sodium-laced microwaveable meals indiscriminately on display for all to see , and checkout-line conversation is no different.
It’s out there for public consumption.
Parents good and bad alike are bombarded by the innocent, yet embarrassing inquiries of young children all the time. Gut instincts often drive us to look for something to hide under (the checkout counter, perhaps?) or quickly locate a time portal (for a world where children are unable to embarrass their parents). We want to distance ourselves from our children, no matter how much we love them, because of awkwardness of the situation.
But what I find even more intriguing is our instinctive desire to distant ourselves from others in every day life, whether that’s based on social status, class or matters of personal taste. This type of thinking plays out in many facets of life, as we try to frame our lives in a way that shows just the right amount of social acceptability and normalness, balanced with the right amount of individualism and participation in groups that interest us. We align ourselves with certain pools of people, and disconnect ourselves from others at the same time, as we hedge our bets on the life that’s right for us.
It’s a guilty by association game, which is especially all the rage among church folks.
Nowadays, some churches have shed the label of “church,” opting to go by names such as The Meeting Place or Elevation in an apparent attempt to severe themselves from the any negative connotations the word “church” may stir up. Or larger groupings of church-goers will re-label themselves to further distance themselves from the negative view of church people that’s prevalent in popular culture, by using such terms as born-again, charismatic, bible-believing, and so on.
Personally, I think this type of marketing is unnecessary, although repackaging old products is often a good way to sway a new culture of “buyers.”
I get the fact that there are many things within Christianity and the church that are not only embarrassing (Christian heavy metal), but downright reprehensible (sex scandals, abuse) and wrong (the reason God doesn’t heal you is because of sin in your life).
But I don’t think “re-branding” is the answer.
Oh sure, a good purging to weed all the bad apples out of Christianity would do a lot of good, but there’s a coming judgement day for that.
People don’t like Christians for a variety of well-founded and, perhaps, perfectly-acceptable reasons.
However, the vehement attacks sometimes leave me feeling defensive for the remnant of well-meaning folks who are making honest attempts to live out a faith that is very much Christian, with the basic ingredients of love for God above all else, and love for one’s neighbour as ones self.
And any attempts to live out this Christian life (contrary to popular opinion, something definitely not for the weak-kneed as first-century martyrs could attest to) comes with a high calling: be perfect.
Those are the seemingly unreasonable words of Christ (easy for you to say, I always think to myself), which give us an indication of the kind of high standard Christians should aspire to.
The problem, which always gets pointed out, is that none of us are indeed perfect, falling somewhere in between the initial meagre attempts at perfection (to be Christ-like) and the kind of life Jesus’ time on earth exemplified.
Some would-be Christ followers disregard the reality that this process hinges on an ongoing exercise of the will after any revelation of Christ as Saviour, which ultimately, but unfairly, discredits God.
What we end up with is a mishmash of believers, some consciously making attempts to be Christ-like, others hoping that “God does all the work,” or worse, that any higher calling to be perfect doesn’t apply to them.
And I’ve grown comfortable with all this.
Not that it doesn’t pain me to see Christians pollute the environment without thought while lauding God’s financial blessing, create Christians subcultures of entertainment and business, cling to faulty theology, create classes of sin with some being worse than others, glorify positions of church work as more admirable than other employment, and so on.
Christianity is incredibly dysfunctional in a lot of ways, but that reality does nothing to crush my hope in a higher power, who didn’t make this mess and is not inconspicuously absent as some think, always available to help through his own self-imposed limits.
After all, if God can’t fix us and the unfortunate consequences of ill conceived actions done in His name, nobody can.
© 2008. Elmira_Independent. All rights reserved.
An economic system built on greed
It was really only a matter of time, this global economic crisis we got ourselves into.
And when I say we, I say there’s plenty of blame to go around on both sides of the ledger.
Truth is cracks in this economic system we know and love where bound to happen sooner or later.
Sure, the entire thing has unraveled in a bizarre anti-free market fashion south of the border.
Bail out for the banks? Are you kidding me?
But maybe that drastic decision involving billions upon billions needed to bail out bleeding lending institutions averted disaster of global warming proportions.
That’s if you believe the hype.
Any way you slice it, government intervention in a free market economy just doesn’t make sense.
The crooks got away with one this time.
(Those CEO’s of banks that no longer exist made how much last year?)
But needless to say, the entire system was ready to cave in on us any way.
Think about.
We’ve developed a way of life that’s dependent on people buying things.
The only problem is, it’s built around having things we don’t really need.
Oh, for sure, there are somethings we just can’t live without.
We need a refrigerator.
We need a lunchbox.
Some of us need wheelbarrows.
But much of what we are told we “need’ in our society is based on artificial needs created by… drum roll please… advertisers.
And the very nature of advertising has changed.
In the good old days, ads told us what a product was and what it did, maybe even why it was so good. Today, product placement is the name of the game, and goods aren’t sold as much as a perceived upgrade to our quality of life, whether we want to believe it our not.
We may not really need that fancy-smancy barbecue, but a backyard bash without one is pretty lame.
Bologna sandwich, anyone?
And oh, we may not need that $30,000 car, but man it sure gets looks from the “chicks.”
Of course, we already know all these things, but choose to remain under the spell of consumerism.
Why?
Well heaven forbid if we would come across as free thinking individuals, who balk at the notion of keeping up with the Joneses.
Besides where would our economy be without people up to their ears in credit debt?
Somebody has to buy the stuff we “need,” the new TVs, and video games systems, cell phones, garage door openers, electric car starters and battery-operated back-scratchers, and seasons 1-5 of our favourite prime time shows.
But the real problem is we hate to be told we can’t have something right bloody now, whether we need it or not.
Impulse purchase?
Why not?
We work hard for or money.
We deserve a break today.
Besides there’s no money down, no payments until 2016.
Buy now, pay later.
Sound good.
Sounds easy.
Delayed gratification?
What kind of a you-only-live-once gotta-have-it-now consumerist would want to embrace a concept as mundane as saving up for something?
Buying something with cash is so 1950s.
Sure, we’ve had our cake and ate it too, but now the cupboards are bare.
We’ve thrown away the basic fundamentals of financial health, and we thought obesity was North America’s number-one problem.
Listen: I’m as sick to my stomach as anyone as the loss of manufacturing jobs continues to mount.
We’ve out-produced ourselves.
Some of those jobs were for making things we need; others maybe not so much.
But a job’s a job.
It pay the bills.
Help feeds the kids.
Goes a long way when trying to keep a roof over your head.
If you’ve haven’t noticed or heard, cash is no longer flowing freely because, quite frankly, people just don’t have enough of it nowadays.
Stock prices are going down as food prices go up.
Gas prices are anyones guess.
Some people won’t be able to retire this year as planned.
Maybe not next year or the next.
So what gives?
Wasn’t capitalism the next best thing since sliced bread?
Didn’t Communism get its butt kicked?
Didn’t we win?
Maybe it’s the Institutionalization of Greed as professor Prabhu Guptara suggests. In a recent address in Washington, D.C., Guptara stated that “what we have is a culture of greed that was politically sponsored and politically promoted, a culture justified by reference to Adam Smith’s notion of the Invisible Hand, that if everybody operates in their self-interest then somehow, magically, everything is looked after.”
He says that unless we confront this truth, we will never begin to understand the problem, let alone address it.
This idea that selfishness drives the economic system of capitalism seems to be true.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s argues that communism failed in Russia because it neglected to take advantage of new technologies as “revolutionary fervor” in socialism dwindled.
“In the end, then, capitalism triumphed because it is a system that is robust to cynicism, that assumes that each man is out for himself. For much of the past century and a half men have dreamed of something better, of an economy that drew on man’s better nature. But dreams, it turns out, can’t keep a system going over the long term; selfishness can.”
Krugman penned this before the recent global economic mess. Despite the inherent greed at the heart of the current crisis, the Economist recently proclaimed in its editorial that capitalism, “for all its flaws, it is the best economic system in the world.”
It suggests that we must learn to manage the crisis that comes along with capitalism better, with the right amount of legislation and regulation in place (a tricky balancing act if you ask me).
However, any system that has greed and self-interest at its root doesn’t give me much confidence, even if it’s hailed as numero uno.
Besides, while capitalism has worked in our favour to makes us North Americans among the richest in the world, it’s created another entirely different set of problems.
Guptara says we have “public disenfranchised and debilitated by unrealistic material expectations.”
The things money can buy don’t satisfy as we’ve heard so many times before.
Yet somehow, we allow ourselves to live under the spell of consumerism, that mindless untracked, undisciplined spending that, in many cases, is meant to ease the pain and drudgery of everyday life. Somehow that never works, since the things we really need in life, other than the basic necessities, can’t be bought.
I’m no economist, but I’ve learned financial lessons the hard way because, after all, a fool and his money are soon parted.
And the society we’ve built, with its excessive consumerism, sures looks foolish in a lot of ways, which leads me to believe that our collective greed is a recipe for disaster in more ways than one.
© October 31, 2008. Elmira_Independent. All rights reserved.
Crisis of environmental conscience
Really, I don’t consider myself to be an environmentally unfriendly kind of guy.
Like a lot of other people I recycle religiously, even try to refuse plastic bags at the grocery store, although a lot of clerks have quickly bagged what I’ve bought before I’ve had the chance.
I even walk instead of drive whenever possible and actually like public transit whenever I take it.
But recently, my respect for the environment was put to the test, and I blew it. I chose the wide road that leads to global warming hell.
Truth is, I was conflicted.
Here was some lady “yaking” on her cellphone parked at the curb in front of our house, car idling all the while – and I did nothing.
Not after 10 minutes, or after 20 minutes, or after half and hour.
Seriously, this lady loved to talked, and obviously wasn’t discouraged by high gas prices to keep the car running and air conditioning going throughout the marathon telephone call.
Of course, it crossed my mind a number of times to knock on the ladies’ window and tell her to shut her vehicle off.
But in the end, perhaps out of respect for her privacy or “right” to do such a stupid thing, I did nothing.
Now I’m not a confrontational person by nature, unless of course I’m living in a basement apartment and there’s a Portuguese family living above that’s invited company over, and it’s well after midnight and I can’t sleep because they’re shouting to heard over each other.
But that’s another story.
No, I’d rather that stupid people come to the realization that what they’re doing is stupid all on their own. But some people don’t get it.
I mean, this I-don’t-mind-letting-my-car-idle-forever lady obviously didn’t care one iota about what carbon emissions do to the air we breathe.
And car idling is a hot button issue right now, because there are a lot of people who want more done to crackdown on idlers.
Poor Tim Hortons (an oxymoron if there ever was one) is being taken to task for their successful business model of serving coffee and donuts, to both police officers and the rest of us, in our cars via the drive thru window.
I’ve even read about some goody-two-shoes green thinkers who snub the drive thru, preferring to park it and join the lineup inside instead in an effort to save the planet.
Not surprisingly, researchers hired by Tim Hortons concluded that impact of short periods of idling in the drive thru, as opposed to parking and using counter service, is negligible.
Convenient science, you may say, but that’s something I’ve heard for years.
However, that really only makes sense if we’re talking really short idling periods of just a couple of minutes.
Given the high prices of gas these days, some drivers are looking for ways to conserve fuel.
Edmonds.com’s six-step list to reduce fuel consumption included an excessive idling test. The result was “more important than we assumed” states the website and the recommendation was to shut down the engine if stopping longer than a minute.
For the test, two cars drove a 10-mile route stopping 10 times and shutting down the engine for two minutes each time. Then the same route was driven at the same speed letting the car idle for two minutes at each stop.
The test concluded that by avoiding unnecessary idling, a driver could save up to 19 per cent in fuel costs.
A similar idle vs. restart experiment was conducted by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in Florida.
A crack team of researchers attempted to bust the myth that letting your engine idle is uses more gas than shutting it down and restarting.
In fact, what the mechanical engineers found out was that, using a vehicle with a V6 engine, restarting it used about the same amount of gasoline as idling for six seconds with the A/C on.
However, road tests nixed the idea of shutting off an idling car at stoplights, which could save a driver as much as 25¢ a day in gas (considering you average 10 minutes sitting at stoplights).
That’s because the demand placed upon the car’s battery and starter would wipe out any major savings from the cost of a major repair.
Which brings to mind the last time I went through the McDonald’s drive thru for a $1.39, 550-calorie double cheeseburger.
Being environmentally conscious, I opted to shut the car off while stuck in a painfully slow line of vehicles, and sat there for at least 4-5 minutes saving fuel and carbon emissions from killing the planet.
Despite my concerns for clean air, I’m not sure I’d do that again.
Frankly, I can live without those cheap, terribly fattening double cheeseburgers, if it comes to that.
But I can’t live without my coffee and the regular trips to local restaurants that cater to my addiction.
And I know a move is afoot to ban people out there from taking advantage of drive thru windows, and put their foot down on businesses that have customers lined up in idling cars for their products.
If we’re actually serious about the protecting the environment, then we need solutions that make sense, not the tokenism that such a ban would smell of in our car-dependent society.
It all makes me believe that the push for alternative forms of transportation and education about the impacts that our car-dependent way of life has on our health, is the most important factor in reducing carbon emissions from vehicles.
It seems a bit odd to crackdown on someone idling for five minutes at the Tim Hortons drive thru on his way to work each day, when his environmentally-conscious neighbour, who doesn’t do such things, drives three or four hours to the cottage every weekend.
Those who had the foresight and business savvy to open drive thru windows didn’t create this monster we call carbon emissions.
It’s been towering over us ever since we created a world in which personal travel by fossil fuel powered contraptions is no longer the exception, but the norm.
And in most driveways, you can times that by two.
© 2008. Elmira_Independent. All rights reserved.
Worship… an event or way of life?
I recently had a conversation about current musical preferences, the type of information corporate execs trip over themselves to get, in attempts to reach target audiences and identify trends and bands on the verge of making it big, so they can ride the crest of the wave.
(That’s if they themselves haven’t already set the agenda. A more likely scenario. Don’t they tell us what to like?).
And I felt kind of bad after the dialogue, especially when I disclaimer-ed a passing interest in “worship music” with a rant about how Keith Green would be livid about the current state of affairs of the “Christian” music industry.
Today’s worship music is not to your grandparent’s liking, that’s unless they are among the hip, with-it seniors crowd, or have jumped ship from a traditional Presbyterian, Lutheran or Catholic congregations to something more, ahem, relevant.
It’s not that I particularly don’t like the direction that worship music has gone, with its cultural relevance and catchy, top-40 sing-along ability. It works on some levels, I guess.
But I have reservations about the entire presentation of worship as more of an event than a way of life, perhaps an inadvertent message, but one that could be interpreted this way nonethless, given its emphasis.
Maybe I’m reading too much into it.
We have very specific times of worship in our church services, deliberate blocks of time to let the P&W band do their thing.
Sometimes the crowd is into it, sometimes their not.
Some sing along, some don’t.
Some sets seem too long, others seem terribly rushed.
What bothers me is that worship is, perhaps, primarily seen as an event, something we do before the sermon, and not as a way of life.
We love our worship, and it may be more valued than some of the other less attractive demands of the gospel (especially when it’s presented in the context of cultural familiarity).
Things such as loving the neighbour that sues you, biting your tongue when your boss tells you he needs you to work overtime for the second day in a row, and so on.
But worship isn’t just singing.
Some congregations have broken the mold by blending visual artists and dancers into the worship experience, which I think is good, maybe a bit distracting, but not necessarily off base.
Somehow, though, it always brings me back to the start.
It’s a way of life.
That means that everything I do is offered to God as an act of worship.
The way I treat my wife. The way I discipline my kids. The way I respond when some yahoo cuts me off in traffic. The way I react after church at the Swiss Chalet when the waitress has messed up the order.
The worst thing that can happen in our Christian worship is to think that corporate expressions of our love for God is the be-all, end-all.
Don’t get me wrong.
There is nothing like a throng of like-minded God chasers singing their guts out.
But it’s what happens after the emotional highs and corporate love-ins with the Saviour that ultimately show our true colours, expressed not in poetic melodies, but in the cold, hard facts of actions that, you guessed it, speak louder than words.
And really, this way of worshipping outside the walls of the church, warehouse or rec centre — wherever it is you `do` church — might take some time, since we begin as spiritual infants and slowly grow into toddlers, teens, adults and grey-hair`d God fearers.
We are called to love God with all we’ve got, and the worship event is a part of this calling, a duty, an obligation and a responsibility.
But we can never divorce worship from the basic, un-sexy call to pick up our cross through the day-to-day grind, when outnumbered by those who don’t share our faith in the workplace, and when beaten about by worry, temptation and the lure of wealth and comfortable indifference.
What we can never do is allow our worship experience to solely exist in high-energy, loud-and-proud corporate settings, or even the lovey-dovey acoustic set and its more intimate songs.
As Matt Redman sings, When the Music Fades and all is stripped away….
| I simply come Longing just to bringSomething that’s of worth That will bless your heart
I’ll bring You more than a song |
© 2009. Chuck Kuepfer. All rights reserved.
