Kaz Trypuc

Corporate America wastes no time. The Rosa Parks Commemorative 7-11 Big Gulp cups should be in stores tomorrow.



Apple, Inc. posted this picture on their homepage in honor of the civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks, who passed away yesterday. Apple feels the need to honor this woman because she contributed to the overall condition of humanity and benefited the "common good." This is the same "common good" your "common" capitalist enterprise supposedly is working for -- not for profit or power -- but the good of the community. Apple apparently sees its contribution to society to be inspiring others to "think differently", as the advertisement says.

Unfortunately, the different kinds of thinking displayed by a woman who refused to stand any longer and by a multimillion dollar corporation peddling a new iPod every 6 weeks are quite different themselves. The pioneering endeavors of all civil rights activists during that era set in motion the powerful reimagining of a "civilized" society where "all men are created equal" (and women). Apple has thought itself right outside the box, and into total control of the digital music market, once again establishing it as a force to be reckoned with on the shelves of Best Buy and the NYSE trading floor. That Apple would be so daring as to compare their innovations in the industry to the resisting of injustice only further shows how different -- and hypocritical -- they are.

Apple, as a profit-minded corporation has no interests in social justice insofar as it does not directly benefit them. Thinking of such issues might lead one to the question of why spending $300 on a device that cost one-tenth of that to produce in another country is justifiable. Such issues might make one question why the technology gap continues to grow around the world but why America seems to be adding more and more frills their computer-run lives. In fact, weren't computers going to change the future? Make things quicker, easier, safer, cheaper, and more manageable? Wasn't technology going to solve the worlds ills? Now I need to spend 2 hours on the phone with tech support so that I can find out why my Palm Pilot isn't syncing with my PC at the same time I am downloading mp3s and playing Counter-Strike with a dude half-way around the world. Doesn't sound like the kind of social ills a more advanced world was going to solve.

Don't get me wrong. Technology has had its benefits and I own an iPod which I enjoy using very much. I could just do without corporations pretending to be anything but enforcers of pacified conformity and institutional monoliths driven by the dollar. Leave Rosa Parks well enough alone. Don't use her because it is easy and convenient. The fact is, Apple would not have put he face on a billboard for their product fifty years ago. It's easy to think "different" now. Last time I checked, Eminem-featuring commercials are about as "different" as Apple gets these days. Some dreamer.

Last week I came to a few decisions about my life in light of certain newly apparent realities. I have always been somewhat of a "tree hugger" but this stuff just makes sense now. The rest of the world is out of its mind.

Point 1. Gas went well over $3/gallon last week. My automobile gets about 10 miles/gallon and I typically use several gallons of gas a day. The odd weight-ratio-energy-efficiency facts surrounding all automobiles is more distinctly realized when you consider that my car weights close to 2500 pounds and uses one gallon of fossil fuels to move my 175 lb. body 10 miles. That is inefficiency. And people in the HOV lanes--don't fool yourselves just because you have two people weighing 350 lbs.

Point 2. Humans make a lot of garbage, and we Americans make more than most. I will spare you the disgusting figures but will help you imagine them. Think of how much trash is left in front of your seat at a ball game. Now multiply that by 70,000 seats. Multiply that by 84 games, and again for each of the 32 teams in Major League Baseball. Now think about how many bags of trash the custodial staff at your place of work goes through each day. Add your home. And every public trash receptacle. EVERY DAY. Where does it all go? Well, some gets destroyed, some buried, and a lot just gets dump on a huge piece of land known as a landfill. But Earth has only so much space. And green space is running out. Where do we put the garbage 20 years from now?

Point 3. Supply and demand dictates that the more scarce something is the more expensive it gets. With gas, that has yet to curb consumption. But prices have nowhere to go but up. Still, people look to consume even more oil in the next decade. And the world will add 2 billion more people in developing nations during that time as well. Today, the world consumes 85 million barrels of oil every day. TRY to imagine 85 million barrels stacked in front of you. Then think about the next 364 days ahead. How much more oil can the Earth possibly have? Chevron itself has begun running ads saying, "It took us 125 years to use the first trillion barrels of oil. We’ll use the next trillion in 30." So, how much longer can we do this? I guarantee people will still be buying it at $10/gallon. And since gas prices have risen close to 10 times the inflation rate, don't be surprised if one day 1/4th of your income is on gas getting you to/from work.

Point 4. I now have this vision of some day in the near future when people just cannot afford to purchase gas anymore. For me, two months' worth of gas is one month's rent already. It is not sustainable. I can just imagine all these cars abandoned on the sides of roads, with empty gas tanks, marking the new landscape of a post-industrial society, Mad Max style. If we ran out of oil tomorrow, the world would LITERALLY come to a halt. No cars, boats, planes, machines, or factories. Now realize that if things continue that future is rushing towards us like a speeding train. Does anyone honestly go about their lives realizing we will run out of oil before I retire? A word of advice: If you do buy a car anytime soon, get a hybrid.

Conclusions. I am going to sell my car. If I lived in a rural area I would get a horse and buggy. But since I live in San Diego I am going to buy a nice bike and get INFINITE miles per gallon of gas. And I plan on reducing, reusing, and recycling as much as possible. Feel free to join me. Does this not make more sense than anything right now?

I spent most of yesterday at the Lifestyles for a Sustainable World Conference at my church. This year's theme was "Sustainability and Spirituality: Living It Locally."


I learned that if San Diego spent $500 million we could put solar panels on the rooves of 18% buildings city-wide, producing enough energy to power every home, office, vehicle, and utility in the county and still have enough left over to export to other cities. Pollution would be significantly reduced and the solar energy would be unending. Ecologist Jim Bell presented these findings in the keynote address along with SDSU business professor Heather Honea. You can read the study for free as part of his new book, Long Range Planning: Creating a Sustainable Economy and Future in the San Diego/Tijuana Region; the two charts he presented are on pages 12 and 20. It would be good for the environment, good for the economy, and good for everyone else. I think that would be great if San Diego pursued such energy independence--we payed enough for energy three years ago during the California Energy Crisis. Remember that? Two words: rolling blackouts.

There is one problem I had with their proposal. I question the choice of Bell and Honea's proposed funding source: private companies. Obviously a majority of the bill would ideally be footed by these companies with additional support from the city, but why would they? After all, in an effort to stifle alternative-energy growth, oil companies have largely taken over the patents for most solar technologies, which is completely abhorrent! For that very reason I have trouble seeing more profit-minded companies aiding in the creation of a renewable energy source like solar power. Capitalist markets require scarcity so that demand is greater than supply and prices remain profitable. Once all these solar panels are in place there is little to no money left to be made. The energy would be limitless and virtually free to produce. Any money gained from exporting it would also be limited since Bell and Honea also believe that once San Diego does it, other cities will follow suit. No, local government would need to largely subsidize it. And yes, I know that's a lot of money and that San Diego is on the verge of bankruptcy. It's not like anyone--the elected officials or the voters--would actually take up such a smart idea.

One of the two workshops I attended focused on consumer choices of seafood and the impact on the environment. Bob Cisneros, the local president of the American Association of Zookeepers and the director of the San Diego Zoo's animal hospital, was the workshop leader. He provided us with small, wallet-sized cards to keep with us that serve as a guide to what kinds of fish it is safe to buy. For example, Chilean Sea Bass is under the "critical" column because it has been fished to near extinction this past decade. Certain kinds of lobester are also on there because of certain by-catch issues as well as concerns that too many South American divers have lost their lives trying to earn pennies for catching them. The card is extremely handy and can be regularly checked for updates at the Montery Bay Aquarium website's Sea Food Watch program. The more specific regional cards can be found here.

For our multicultural dinner each of the 5 tables was served a different cultural cuisine: Nigerian, Haitian, Honduran, Cambodian, and American. All foods were relatively "healthy" but still low in nutritient volume, that is except for the American meal. It was 2 slices of pizza and a Coke--lots of calories but mostly fat and sugar. Tofu, rice, beans, vegetables, bread, etc. made up various parts of the other meals. I was pretty hungry by the time dinner rolled around but I ate the meager offering of Cambodian food put before me. Boy was I craving that pizza. I truly realized how lucky I am to have so much food and food of my choosing at that. For people who say the poor just don't work hard enough to make it in the world, I wonder why anyone would choose to be on the verge of starvation? As I write this I must realize there are over 1 billion people malnourished in this world, dying. That is a harsh reality for someone who went to Taco Bell today and got to take home leftovers. One of the other things our chef noted, was how remarkable it is that these dishes get prepared at all considering how long it takes to cook them when one does not have a gas stove or a microwave. It is especially remarkable because the typical food preparers are women, many of whom must fetch water for themselves and their family each day. Apparently, close to 1 billion people also live one or more kilometers away from drinkable water--my kitchen tap is 15 feet away. The "average" person needs 5 gallons of water per day (water for drinking, bathing, toileting, cleaning, gardening, and preparing food). If you live in a family of eight you need to haul 40 gallons, on your head, over 2km each trip and STILL have time to make dinner. Fortunately they aren't collecting water for Westerners, who I am told use 80 gallons of water per person per day in Europe and 120 gallons of water per person per day in the US. Here's to Michael Lodahl's proposition that we all take shorter showers!

To see the real world impact of such disparity, read the story about the Bolivian town of Cocachamba and their struggle for water and life. Just imagine not being able to afford water and having some company buy the rights to RAIN WATER in order to keep you from freely gathering it!

All in all it was a good conference that I recommend you all attend next year.

Once again, at that fabulous resource for Christian poetry, prose, criticism, and cultural and religious analysis known as The Matthews House Project, I found this short piece titled "On Not Being Finessed by Carnival Barkers or Someone Else’s Talking Points" by David Dark, author of The Gospel According to America: A Meditation on a God-Blessed, Christ-Haunted Idea. The block-quote at the end of the post is one of the more poignant characterizations of Christians' recent failure to claim a truly unique witnessing voice in a world in tumult.

Dark offers some reflections about the most recent elections and about how we sometimes are forced into a certain paradigm based on the agendas of others. "Learning to doubt wisely, discern shrewdly, and pray generously," he says, are some proscriptions for finding our own witnessing voice in a world full of sales-pitches (commercial and political), that are by definition untruthful, trying to hook us.

Christians were oft divided last November. We were hooked. Bush's message about his personal faith bought him unwavering support from evangelicals and Kerry was a softly-spoken Catholic who offered a "kinder, gentler" war on terror without the "good and evil" rhetoric, as well as promised a liberal social agenda. But did we all not fall victim to the divisiveness and quarreling warned against in Paul's first letter to Corinth? It is there that he admonishes those who fall victim to worldly wisdom and follow mere men, Paul included. Christians often forgot how to speak of Christ and His victory, and instead presumed to put the fate of the world in the outcome of an election. Dark, a non-partisan Christian patriot, goes on:

We dilate the significance of our witness when we allow our speech to play into a “moral values” market category or a pillar in the architecture of Karl Rove. Ancient wisdom has long notified that the powerful and the self-justifying, self-described righteous will barter in truthlessness with the best of intentions, forcing themselves and their listeners into limited identities. Students of the Bible know that false authorities have a way of multiplying and coopting all things human and humane. Doing as they will, principalities and powers makes us deaf to the possibility of confession. They numb us to the joys of finding out, daily, how we’ve come to view the world wrongly and how we’ve failed to view our neighbors and enemies as sacraments in themselves.

Whenever we’re viewed as objects rather than participants (poll numbers, target markets, collateral damage), we can begin to note that we’ve entered into the carefully constructed system of fetishes called a commercial. Learning to doubt wisely, discern shrewdly, and pray generously might seem like too much extra work in an already overblown day. It helps when two or more are nearby (or e-mailable) to assist in the work of communal discernment which is the life of a functioning church.

Well said. Although I was someone who did not vote, I was by no means apolitical, and I need to be reminded of my failures to truly discern wisdom as the knowledge of God in Christ. For who is it that I really serve but the Lord of Heaven and Earth?


Note: In the end of that passage Dark mentions "poll numbers, target markets, [and] collateral damage." This type of categorization of the world seems to be a common theme in my recent posts. To see the link between The Corporation (previous posts) and the Church I recommend Christianity Incorporated: How Big Business Is Buying the Church. Also, the topic of objectification, or commodification, of people (poll numbers, target markets, etc.) is touched upon in a hard-to-find documentary The Ad and the Ego, which shows how over the last 100 years, advertising has changed from informing the public about a product, to the systematic coercive selling of image and desire itself (see also the Cavanaugh material in the two most recent posts).

Lastly, a well-respected professor at PLNU, Karl Martin, delivered a chapel address in the spring of 2004, on the ways in which our world seeks to define us as consumers and citizens, and makes our Christianity subordinate to those. As I hope I have shown in many of my posts, we seem to be all too willing to give in to these categorizations. As a consumer, not only do we allow our desires to be shaped by Coke and Nike, but we transform ourselves into products--there are all too many people selling advertising space on their bodies or their naming rights on eBay--for consumption by others. This comes in several regular forms--the daily conforming our outwardly appearance to societal standards, pornography and the objectification of sex, and...reality TV, where the value of others comes from their ability to amuse us, often by engaging in destructive and humiliating behaviors. Martin says he doesn't want to watch any program that "encourages others to be bad." The conclusion he comes to is that we are now selling ourselves because we have so totally and completely been turned into consumers that we feel obliged to become consumable. A Christian ethic, Martin says, leads us to turn away from the offering of others in such an inhumane way--we must treat our neighbors better than they ought or ask to be treated. He then asks, "what does it mean to be a Christian first, and an American second?" We must love Christ more than we love any human attachment--even a nation. As people who are inevitably made consumers and citizens, how do we deal with the temptation to be merely those two things? We cannot cease to be either, but we can make those identities subordinate to our Christian identity. This is the address (RealPlayer required). Also, there is a :45 blank spot in the recording towards the end.