Ignorance is Easy

Today after work* (read: helping to put in a cement floor and planting spinach, carrots, and beets… my mouth salivates even now thinking of the latter) I made it a goal of mine to attain some products I felt I needed which only amounted to four things: chocolate for long overdue Easter packages, sunscreen, aloe vera, and body wash. Now, around the time spring arrived and I started to thaw out of my depression, I made it a larger goal of mine to be super conscious of how I live my life in order to feel as though I am not just another sheep being herded toward our extinction. So, before heading out to Target, my store of choosing while I try to rid myself of a mound of recently found gift cards, I sat down to do some research. Here’s what I found…

Ignorance is easy. As long as you don’t question the products you’re using, you can continue living a life in which you go out and attain anything you want immediately. But once you start to ask: where does my chocolate come from? What’s in my sunscreen? Your life becomes a whole lot more complicated. It’s not all that surprising that taking a step back to review the fast-paced life of purchasing leads to a more “difficult” life. The products advertised today are made of quick solutions. Chocolate is cheap because those who work on cocoa farms (often children) aren’t paid(1); sunscreen applies clear to your skin because zinc oxide (the ingredient that blocks UVA and UVB rays and leaves a white hue) has been replaced by a slew of harmful chemicals(2). If we go back a few years, pre industrial revolution, we can assume with evidence that life was really quite hard. Corporations didn’t gain the power they did because they made our lives marginally better; they’ve gained their footholds because our lives were really taxing and we were tired and stressed with too much on our plate (corps. haven’t seemed to fix that yet….). Companies mass produced dishwashers and sunscreen and chocolate we could purchase, with relatively little money and a hell-of-a-lot more ease. A lot of days I’m not willing to give up that ease. I spent two hours researching ethical chocolate and non-harmful sunscreens only to reason that all I could do was settle for buying expensive products online or make my own. By the time I got to aloe vera I could only muster one search that revealed the gel I usually use is filled with extra unpronounceable ingredients; so in the end I just crossed one item off my list–body wash, Dr. Bronners, which for some reason is one of the few mainstream ethical, sustainable, non-harmful** products out there. I spent nearly three hours trying to buy four items, only to end up buying one; this is not efficient. But I only have myself to care for and I know for a fact that I wouldn’t have the time to go hunting for the perfectly certified product if I had a taxing full-time job like raising a family. It’s not the average consumers fault that they are buying unethical, non-sustainable, toxic products; they just don’t have the time or energy to seek out the gems amidst the piles and piles of shit. Also, many consumers are unaware of all that goes into their purchases since marketers are really quite clever.

You may be wondering why I put difficult in quotation marks up there. Actually, you’re probably not, but I will tell you anyway that the prescription of the word difficult in that context is not my own. Many of my fellow product-purchasing humans and the corporations that created them give it such a fate. To me a difficult life is one in which I watch my mother suffer and die at age 57 from a cancer very likely caused by the increasing number of carcinogens in our everyday lives. Difficult is knowing that almost every chocolate purchase in mainstream American grocery stores perpetuates child slavery in Ghana and the Ivory coast.

These difficulties bog me down and fuel my depression. And I guess the way to fight that depression is to buy responsibly. So that is what I must do.

*I work here now. Being back on a farm makes my soul happy.

**Dr. Bronners may have ingredients that irritate sensitive skin. Not all skin types like all essential oils. 

1: http://www.foodispower.org/slavery-chocolate/

2: http://www.ewg.org/2014sunscreen/the-trouble-with-sunscreen-chemicals/