Dollars and Sense

The World is Flat.

That’s the title of the book we’re required to read for Global Studies.

While it’s hardly believable that the world has been flattened (I am, of course, circumnavigating it as we speak), I think the title captures a profound shift in reality for my generation.

It’s a shift that actually makes it feasible to set foot in sixteen countries by the time you’re twenty years old. Can you imagine?

A shift that allows you to drink coffee in Spain and play drums in Ghana and eat dim sum in China within whimsically short amounts of time—something a twenty-year-old a hundred years ago probably couldn’t conceive.

This freedom of movement my generation is so fortunate to have at our fingertips also implies that the injustices of the world are framed in much more personal ways than they’ve ever been before. My generation can take cameras to far away places and witness for themselves the unimaginable and grotesque realities of our world—we’re not as reliant on third party media sources to rally us into action.

I see that my generation cares. This is good news.

But.

I am also deeply concerned for my generation.

I’m concerned that this newfound proximity to the world’s injustice is failing to correlate with life change (my name being at the top of that list).

I’m concerned that we’re able to travel half way around the world, snap a few pictures holding an impoverished black child, upload them to Facebook when we get home, and think we’ve done something to change the world, meanwhile our lives continue to look much the same as they did before.

I’m concerned that we’ve been trained to care about poverty reduction (a good thing), while remaining unchallenged to examine poverty production—that is, how it’s created and continues to persist.

I’m concerned that my generation is trying to place band-aids on a wound the size of the developing world. I’m concerned that we’re holding our hands against the world’s lacerations, convinced all the while that the bleeding can be stopped with some feelings of sympathy or a vague solidarity we might share with the poor because we stood in a shack once—we, however, returned home to life as usual, and they continue to be unfed and underpaid.

We need band aids and hands that are willing to help, we absolutely do. These are valid and right responses to pain. But I have to wonder, if these wounds are actually going to see healing, will it take something more? Might it take investigating the cause of the matter to stop its perpetuation? Might this cost us something?

But alas, we’re functioning in an economic framework where scarcity’s implicit and rationality’s assumed. Fine and dandy…except that from where I stand, resources aren’t all that scarce on our side of the world, and human beings are far from rational when we spend on ice cream what could rightly feed entire continents. Are not there flaws in the foundational rhetoric used to organize our world system?

And maybe, just maybe, this all might have something to do with why our acts of charity, however well intentioned, never quite seem to be enough.

Because we are still playing within the boundaries of a broken system we feel we can’t escape—a system that so brilliantly perpetuates an organized creation of dissatisfaction. This, in turn, fuels a deadening cycle of detached, meaningless consumption—a cycle we feel helplessly subjected to and powerless to change. It’s also a cycle I’m convinced is contrary to the life of abundance offered through Jesus’ redemptive act on the cross—he died, after all, that we might know a satisfaction that surpasses dollars and cents.

Consumption itself is the most basic and necessary acts of our human nature—we consume to live. And so consumption is far from evil in and of itself, but only in so much as it acknowledges the basic rights and wellbeing of the party on the producing end of things. And my generation has a comatose enough conscience to know the ways in which modern consumption fails to acknowledge these rights, and lets it continue anyway.

The hard thing is that I don’t have easy, clean answers (which I know the devil’s advocate will be eager to point out when I’m painting with this broad of strokes). I do know of my longing for a way of living that perpetuates justice and abundance and, a recurring theme throughout my voyage, freedom.

I think I just might be getting ready to embark on a journey to discover what that looks like in the day to day. (And I’d rather not do it alone, if you’d like to join me)

I recognize, of course, that this will mean the rejection of many things—I feel scared about this—as I know already that I will fail many times. I take comfort in knowing that at the end of the day, such a failure will only leave me praying for grace and wrestling anew with the complexities of the world, which is perhaps the best possible place I could find myself.

Bitterness is never beautiful, and cynicism is the last thing the world needs more of, which is why I offer these words to my generation as gently and humbly as possible—knowing all the while that I am as guilty and confused as the next person—but struggling, in spite of it all, to say something that matters to the world.

Love. Anna