Detachment is convenient. I discovered it when I saw little Shiri's
face when she found out that chicken fingers (or nuggets) and the barn
animal called chicken are one and the same, and that hamburgers were
made of cows. Yes, that big stupid-looking animals that moos. Indeed,
it took her a whole thirty minutes
to let the tragedy go, and take the next bite. Some kids find out
later in life and turn vegetarians, not our carnivore kids. Except
Karen, the oldest, who claims to be a vegetarian until she lands a nice
piece of chicken. But that's not the point.
If you are able to separate chickens from kebab, pigs from pork, cattle
from hot dogs, you become numb. It's different altogether when you
realize what you're doing, and you do it still. I see nothing wrong in
eating chicken, or beef, or pork. I see human beings as the ultimate
predators, and predators consume meat. I don't believe any other
predator in nature is experiencing second thought before, during, or
after having consumed some unfortunate animal that found its way into
its jaws. As long, of course, as the killing is done in a humane
way, and that survival of species is considered.
In this day and age, detachment plays a big role in our lives and our
children's lives. Everything is processed, it's original shape and
form gone, consequences ignored. Chickens and cows are part of it, but
there are much more interesting examples.
Outsourcing is a good example of detachment. Let me explain. An
American (or European, or Israeli for that matter) consumer purchases something at the local store. The
store buys that item in bulk from some distributor who buys
it from the manufacturer who is usually in a different country. Most
likely in
Asia. It's relatively easy to track down the store, the distributor
and the even the manufacturer. But the manufacturer may have subcontractors,
and tracking them down is a whole different story. In
other words, the manufacturer doesn't actually manufacture the thing on
his own, he
actually outsources it. The other subcontractor outsources it as
well. And so on and so forth. So much so, that audit teams coming to
check manufacturing processes, materials, labor practices find no data
whatsoever. In many cases, they can't even find the factory that
actually makes the damn thing, they can't track down the raw materials and
the workers. It's like a black hole, spewing manufactured items once
in a while.
But this is where the trouble is. Well at least some trouble. The
last one on the list, the people who actually sweat to make this item. They may be children, they may be abused, overworked,
underpaid, mistreated. Materials may be substandard even poisonous. Manufacturing
processes may
be unsafe, even illegal. But here comes the convenience of
detachment.
What you don't know doesn't bother you. Well, it should.
When you go to the store and buy something that seems unbelievably
cheap, or "too cheap to be true" you
should employ your brain. You should know, if it's too cheap to be
absolutely clean, it probably isn't. Clean of child abuse and child
labor, of lead based paint and other substandard materials, of unsafe
processes or illegal labor practices. If it's not clean,
don't buy it. Buy the other one, the more expensive one that has some
kind of guarantee that it's kosher. And hold the store and the
distributor responsible. And yourself too.
Yes, indeed, it's your local store's responsibility to do it for you.
But they're too busy raking it in. Big money, over your detachment,
and someone else's broken fingers, backs and lives.
Another type of detachment I realized recently is the stock market.
Take CMOs for example. You don't know what it is? You're not alone.
Many people have no idea what CMO stands for, and even less people know
how to evaluate it. Collateralized Mortgage Obligations (CMOs) are
a type of mortgage-backed security that creates separate pools of
pass-through rates for different classes of bondholders with varying
maturities, called tranches. The repayments from the pool of
pass-through securities are used to retire the bonds in the order
specified by the bonds' prospectus.
(http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cmo.asp). Complicated?
Definitely. But in short it means that if scores of people are
defaulting on their mortgage payments, owners of CMOs lose money. A
lot of money. Many now say that either they had no idea what this
security was when they invested in it, and that the bank that sold it
to them rated the security low-risk or risk-free, while in reality (as
we now know) this was far from being true. The point is, when you
invest money in a security, the "homeowner" who can't pay the monthly
payments is as far from your investment as pork is far from breakfast sausage.
And there's another similarity. The famous joke suggests that when it comes to a bacon and egg breakfast, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.
Investors, as well as homeowners, are in this case, committed...
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