It Is Better To Light A Single Candle Than Support Oligarchy
Jeff Bezos chose not to end world hunger today, but I decided to buy chocolate from a company that does not use slave labor. Apple has today again chosen to pay the people who create their phones a bare subsistence wage, and today I have chosen not to own a smart phone. Today, Bill Gates is the largest owner of farmland, but I have eaten a locally-grown apple from a small farmer.
It often feels futile to try to save energy by turning off a light when you leave a room while people like Elon Musk are blasting themselves off into space as a way of boosting their own egos. Surely the extremely wealthy are the greater exploiters and the greater wasters of the Earth’s resources. But I don’t think their greater wrongs justify our participation in lesser ones.
You can complain all you want about the evil people who run the world, but the first meaningful step in ending their rule is to not participate in evil. And I understand how many of us are hurting and how hard life is and I don’t want to say it’s possible to avoid all evil and still survive in this world. But we have to make some sort of distinction between ourselves and those we blame for the problems of the world. We need to prove that something better is possible and we can only do that by demonstrating an alternative.
We have to show that there is a real difference between that which we oppose and that which we claim we want. A lot of people say they want to go to war against all the evil that exists in the world today, but very few of us are willing to enlist. Fewer still are willing to fight in the trenches.
Most of us want to sit on the sidelines and root for the home team. Most of us would rather curse the darkness than light a single candle.
P.S. I’m as imperfect and hypocritical as the next guy. But today I can honestly say there is one less plastic bag floating in the ocean than there might have been if I had let my imperfections and hypocrisy stop me from doing anything at all. If I can convince one person to join me, then make that two.