Standing Up

I had to buy something today. I was getting on the bus and noticed that my hose had a huge run in it. I’d have gone bare-legged, but I don’t think anybody wanted to see what was going on with my legs this morning. So I had to stop at the store and pick up a new pair of stockings. They were very cheap, and while it may not have been an “emergency,” they were on sale and now I have a nice new pair of hose, which I did need. I estimate that by this point in the month I’d have spent a good $20 by now.

No caffeine is also going okay. Not good, but okay. The headaches suck, big time, but they’re blissfully short. I was researching to see what kind of products have caffeine, so I can avoid them, and was depressed to discover that dark chocolate contains significant quantities of caffeine. Now, I’m no chocolate-fiend, but there are times when the only thing that will do it is a nice bar of dark chocolate. I continued my research. Sometimes (okay, often) research about one topic leads to another topic, one you weren’t expecting, but becomes so much more interesting to you. This is exactly what happened to me.

I was horrified to discover that there is a strong association between chocolate and child slavery. See, most of the chocolate in the world is grown in the Ivory Coast, where there have been hundreds of confirmed cases of young boys being tricked into slavery by cocoa growers, who then beat them, force them to work without pay, barely feeding them, and then dumping them when they’re “spent,” scarred and homeless and friendless, left to fend for themselves against the world. As I clicked link after link, I came to realize that this was not just one guy’s paranoid delusion. More and more reliable sources confirmed what I had been reading, and I became more and more disgusted with us, with people, for allowing these things to happen right under our noses, just because we “can’t live without chocolate.”

Long ago, I began to boycott the diamond industry for its inhumane and insanely manipulative business practices, but admittedly it’s a lot easier for a lower-middle-class receptionist to boycott the diamond industry than the chocolate industry. Turns out that Hershey’s AND M&M Mars use chocolate that comes from the Ivory Coast, and the problem over there is so prevalent that you can bet money that your bag of M&Ms only exists because some kid was stolen or purchased from his family and tortured into picking the beans that made the chocolate.

Well, that just about did it for me. I don’t get on my high horse about many things like this. I don’t just go around boycotting things and making a big stink over them. Something has to be really disgusting in order for me to get in my shit about it. I don’t really have a problem, for instance, with the porn industry, or even with prostitution. I’m not going to boycott Starbucks just because they have a separate line for women in Saudi Arabia. But for me, this chocolate issue qualifies.

I’ve spent a large part of my life trying to figure out what my values are, and I’ve been able to piece together, through many internal arguments and much internal debate, a few hard-and-fast rules by which I will live my life. Not supporting the blatant, heartless exploitation of innocents for the sole purpose of obtaining a profit with low overhead is one of them. And I intend to avoid chocolate from now on: not just because of the caffeine content, but because I will not support an industry that so pointedly ignores the very basics of human life and interaction in pursuit of money.

For a Total Change of Heart: Know your values. Level every choice you make against them, and make no exceptions. Your morality should always take precedence over your impulses. Find something worth fighting for and don’t stop fighting for it. That is the ONLY way to inspire real change in yourself and in others.