GREENHAMMER: DO AS YE WILL

Do as ye will

The Wiccan AND Pagan code states, ‘DO AS YE WILL AND HARM NONE’, and I want to introduce a new angle to help advance our thinking. What we buy is becoming more important and I’d like to show you how. Given the choice of a 20 dollar shirt from a company in Bangladesh that pays its workers five dollars a day or a 30 dollar shirt from Sweden, which should we choose?

Take the example of Lucy in Bangladesh, she was taken out of school at the age of 9 to work in a sweatshop. Now at 19 her hands are so sore and worn out she doesn't know how she keeps going. Every waking minute is torture and she is unable to see the gift that life is. Like many working poor, she is vulnerable to Christianity and Islams message that it is okay to live with coercive authority because there will be rewards in heaven.

Back to that shirt: why would you want to pay ten dollars more to the Swedish manufacturer that treats its workers humanely with good pay and vacations, but whose job is threatened by Bangladeshi sweatshop workers who are the modern-day slaves? Why change now? It was our parents and grandparents purchases in the 60’s and 70’s that precipitated the exodus of clothing manufacturers from the United States. Buy the cheaper shirt and laugh, it’s their problem, but then it’s YOU that is helping to expand the sweatshop system that will eventually engulf us all and perpetuate a growing workplace tyranny.

Norma Rae

Your grandchildren will look at you all misty-eyed and weary from another 14 hour day at the microchip factory and ask,” Why did your generation just lay down and die, Grandma? How were you so brainwashed that you couldn’t stand up to coercive authority and prevent the emergence of corporate theocratic fascism. What shortsighted idiots!” `

Pagans, I’m asking you to look a little deeper: do ye harm none when you buy that cheaper shirt? Like it or not we are all loosely connected in the global marketplace and as poorly as Pagans have been treated, we need to see the billions that slave for our low prices today. Billions are suffering as the human population skyrockets out of control; women thrown into factories, men working in a near-death state in mines.

Lucy Thu in Bangladesh is so tired and disgusted that when shop mate Rosuh Rivutah loudly proclaims that they should start a union, her hopes rise briefly as she dreams of joy and happiness. If she could earn more she could buy a refrigerator and TV for the family and some rugs and maybe have children that wouldn’t starve to death.

The next morning Rosuh is found dead with the implied warning that if you fight the power you will die. Lucy’s despair deepens; it seems like the End of All Hope. UNION IS THE WORD WE DARE NOT SPEAK. The fact is that if there was a worldwide minimum wage of a dollar an hour, a pair of sneakers, for instance, would only increase from 70 to 75 dollars. Even though the workers wage has quadrupled the price only goes up 7% because most of the cost of the product goes to corpulent executives and their sickening greed along with the transportation costs and various forms of white collar crime.

We have more products than we can manage and we can create dignity, comfort and happiness in the lives of the working poor in the next 20 years or continue to kowtow to the monied interests and the pitchfork wielding Christian and Islamic TERRORIST Mobs. It’s a sick evil greed that has made the lives of billions a hell on earth but the concern of right wing wackos and moral high ground hypocrites is gay rights and other contrived moral issues.