Anyone care to make a short film?

Idea for a very short film to promote WikiChoice.com (like Radiohead's "All I Need" video)

A movie theater is packed full of Americans. On the screen plays a series of powerful ads - for shoes, for clothes, for electronics. The audience is in awe.

Cut to a dim, noisy sweatshop. Asian children are making shoes, clothes, electronics. An American man in a suit stands over them, barking orders, dolling out punishment.

Back to the theater. The same man in a suit stands at the front of the theater, surrounded by stacks of boxes of new products, and smiling as he jots down orders and sends smiling, uniformed American youth to take the boxes up into the audience and collect money.

Back to the sweat shop. The American man in the suit is angry, shouting that the kids aren't making enough products, that he's going to sell out too quickly.

Back to the theater, the stacks of boxes are almost gone. The American man smiles sheepishly and ducks behind the screen as the ads continue to play. We follow him and find that the sweatshop is right there behind the screen. The man in the suit cocks his harm to hit a child, who screams in fear, but --

Back to the theater. The scream from behind the screen is drowned out by the beginning of the next ad.

Cut to black, and the text: "What will you choose when you know? WikiChoice.com"

There is no information on earth whose accessibility will improve the world more than this.

Recently Google staged the beginning of a contest. They call it "10 to the 100th." They accepted submissions for ideas that would "change the world by helping as many people as possible," and they've put up $10,000,000 to make the winning ideas a reality. I submitted one.

I'm finding it hard to get around the notion that the force shaping today's world more than any other is the rich, Western consumer market. That is, when you or I run to the local Target, we are exercising our share of the world's most powerful aggregate force. Think about it - we're busy making money to buy things, and the rest of the world is busy making those things. More lives are shaped by our collective purchasing decisions than by any other identifiable factor.

The problem is, this power is not recognized by the public, the consumers, us, and so not used intentionally. Those who have recognized it are large multinational corporations, who realize that they can drive down costs by forcing poor people to work in poor conditions, and reap huge profits by advertising their cheaper products to rich people as cool, new, expensive.

And corporations are far more flexible than the governments that regulate them. They can work in many countries at once, while any one government may only govern one. The drive for profits in this void of accountability has led companies to despicable business practices, taking advantage of workers and the environment in countries where the government is unable or unwilling to effectively regulate them.

So now an American mother buying back-to-school clothes for her daughter might be buying clothes made by a little girl who will never go to school. And when a little boy pulls a Christmas chocolate out of his stocking, there's a good chance a little boy in West Africa was enslaved to make that chocolate. And yet still we buy.

We base our purchasing decisions on what will benefit us and our families - what will look good, taste good, feel good, etc. Our main source of information on new products is the litany of commercial advertisments we are subjected to.

But this barrage of ads is a slight of hand, a painting over, a curtain falling between us and the reality of the products we are buying. The truth is that they came from somewhere, they were made by someone, and this history matters far more than whatever version of hip the advertiser wants us to associate his product with. And it's only if we care about and act on this history that we can harness the power of our own purchases and make the changes we'd like to see in the world.

After all, the ultimate power lies with us. We have the money. And if we won't buy it, companies won't make it. Collectively we have the power to improve millions, if not billions of lives, simply by making more informed, more intentional purchases.

So what has kept people from doing that so far? At first I thought it was lack of information, that no one knows where and how products are made, or who makes them. But I have come to learn that it's not that the information isn't out there, it's that it's not accessible. It's spread out across 100 books and 1,000 websites. Many don't know how to go about learning all that would be necessary to make proactive purchases. So what do we do?

This is what I proposed to Google. Create a wiki-based website, like Wikipedia.com, that collects all the information about the ethical practices of all the companies that we buy from. So if all you want is to buy an ethical toothbrush, just do a search on the site for 'toothbrush,' and the five most ethical options will pop-up. If you want to go deeper you can type a company name and read through the collective knowledge of its ethical practices, good and bad. And you can search for an industry, like chocolate, and find out what is happening in the chocolate industry that you might want to consider before buying chocolate.

I call it WikiChoice.com. If Google likes it as much as I do then it will be entered into a round of voting in January, and I will need your help to make sure that this idea is chosen.

Truly, there is no information on earth whose accessibility will improve the world more than this.

A house burning

The beginning of a song I started writing a couple days ago:

There's a house burning across the street
I think I hear people dying
And I watch its glow upon my feet
And wonder why I'm not crying

These lyrics surfaced on my consciousness while driving through Balboa Park earlier this week. I wasn't trying to create at the time - they sang themselves to me.

One week ago I got news that a man I used to work with in northern Uganda was brutally murdered. Though I was not especially close with him I did appreciate him, and the news affected me deeply. It sat me down and laid out before me, once again, all the disparity between our wealthy homeland and places like northern Uganda, the great gap between our opportunities and theirs, between our vast array of choices and their imprisonment in cycles of poverty and violence.

Sitting here in San Diego I am impotent to address this tragedy; I can not offer comfort or commiseration, peace or vengeance. I can not be there to celebrate his life or help lay him in the finality of the open earth.

One thing I can do is live my life with constant remembrance of our suffering neighbors in Uganda, in Sudan, Congo, and Somalia, in Sierra Leone and Cote d'Ivoire, in Burma and North Korea, and in hundreds of other locales throughout the globe, letting our common humanity and innate equality inform my choices.

I realized last week, though, that I haven't been doing this. Many of my decisions have the oily sheen of self-absorption, even though I know better than most how little I need my own concern, and how much others might rightly benefit from it.

Moreover, I realized again that my empathy is extremely limited (empathy in this case synonimizing with love or selflessness). Though I have seen great suffering around the world, my attention seems so easily lulled away from anything of consequence. Hence, I believe, the song lyrics that my subconscious delivered up to me: "I wonder why I'm not crying."

Perhaps these are the growing pains of a heart. More to come on these themes.

The economics of prostitution

Sex tourism is a direct result us being better off than them. A desperately poor family sends their daughter away to ‘work in the city’, a rich old American man flies across the world with a suitcase full of t-shirts and condoms. It’s the old story of rich and poor. We’re rich, they’re poor, so we get to buy their daughters. And as long as we’re buying, someone is sure to keep selling.

I use the example of sex tourism because it’s disturbing, yes even revolting, but it's not extreme. It isn't. It is practiced by millions all over the world. Most countries that I’ve been to have a prominent sex tourism industry – India, Thailand, Nepal, Ukraine. And Uganda’s sex industry, though relatively hushed, is still thriving. These countries are poorer than us rich countries, so we get to buy their daughters.

It happens in America too, poor women sell themselves to rich men. And we import. We buy the daughters of poor countries and have them shipped, over-nighted. Why not? We can afford it.

As I prepare to come back to America I'm thinking a lot of about economic disparity and I realize that it's more than that. It's economic injustice. Our wealth coupled with their poverty breeds injustice - like a sweaty sock breeds bacteria.

These thoughts crystallized while reading up on our presidential candidates. Each one talks about how to keep America at the top of the economic ladder, how to assure ourselves that our daughters won't be shipped away. And I can hardly blame them.

The problem is that as the reigning economic leaders of the world our protectionist policies don't just protect us. They inflict serious damage on the poor. Our economic policies are meant to benefit Americans, and only Americans, even if they are to the detriment of other countries and people, and even if the economic activities that they describe take place in those countries. Our power is so great that we can economically subjugate people in their own country. We can walk into their house and buy their daughters, as it were.

More about economic injustice to come.