Fair Trade and Chocolate Justice
October 7, 2007
Fair Trade Sunday
by Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper

How is it that pleasure is so connected to pain? Why is it that three glasses of wine make us so happy and the fourth makes us sad? How can it be that something with all the fun of chocolate is problematically produced? No, this is not a sermon about unique forms of sexual pleasure, derived from pain. This is a meditation about the way pleasure is connected to pain - and how something as solid sounding as "balance" is not the answer to the problem. We need a solution in a different key to a problem as large and seemingly permanent as Fair Trade. Anything small trivializes the problem, which starts in the morning with coffee, shows up at lunch in the salad, and goes to bed at night with the hot chocolate that, fairly produced, might actually soothe you.

Consider the Jubilee, described in Leviticus and Deuteronomy today. It rebalances the agricultural system. What makes trade fair? Some say Jubilee makes things fair, or at least is one good method. I like it as one good method, but only as part of a quiver of strategic arrows. Six years for the rich and one for the poor is just too balanced and formulaic. That balance doesn't have the extravagance of chocolate. Nor does Communism, another great balancer. I am reminded of how my eyes hurt in Lithuania: everybody had ugly buildings in which to live, except for those who could cheat their way out of Communism. Long ago we realized that we need both bread and roses, bread and chocolate, fairness and frivolity. If I thought there wasn't enough to go around, or that God had been stingy with creation, I could imagine the balance solution working. Rice for all would be the fairest of trade. But I think God has a more extravagant solution in mind. It uses balance strategies on the way to pleasure principles, for all.

So if I am pro-Jubilee as a start on global debt and pro-Jubilee as a method of rebalancing a ridiculous imbalance, I can't just stop there. I need to go back to that link between pleasure and pain and say that the destination of creation (I know, big words), the destination of creation is maximum pleasure and minimum pain. Things don't have to be this way. There is no need. There is plenty to go around. To change things we need to flip a switch in our hearts. We need to lust after a change in our hearts. Change comes when we can't help ourselves anymore; we must.

Three models give me a Fair Trade strategy, which I would call "balance plus." Balance unbalanced. Balance ballooning into joy. Balance as fun, not spanking. These are my images of Fair Trade. One comes from the learnings of David Blythe and his international student exchange program. Many of us have either been abroad on such a program, seen our offspring off on such a program, or had fond feelings for Peace Corps kinds of initiatives. We know it is good for people like us to get off our island and into the sea. We even have fantasies that such exposures may result in more fairness in trade, of all kinds. David tells me - and I hope he won't mind my abbreviation - that when people go abroad, certain patterns repeat themselves. There is a developmentalism to the off-site experience. In the first period, students tend to either defend their home country as the best in the world or flip and deride their home country as the worst in the world. In the second period, they move into "minimalization" of these extremes or to the golden rule, in which they balance their perspective: "My country and this country have both virtues and flaws, and I see them both." In this golden rule period, we tend to treat the other as we'd like to be treated ourselves. David suggests that his organization is trying to go to another place, and I think it is a very exciting place. He called it the platinum rule, beyond the golden rule. There we see the other the way they see themselves - not with our lens, but with their lens. And that to me is the jumping off place for Fair Trade: we become actually concerned, as supposed to just guilty, about what price people we now know get paid for their chocolate. We see our chocolate pleasure as their chocolate pain and we give a damn. I doubt that anything like Fair Trade can come until the platinum rule overtakes at least a few people - and a desire for worldwide pleasure overcomes us, the way lust over comes us. We can't not act on it.

Another image, and one less utopian, is to look around our own city at the many spas where some women get the pleasure of their nails being done while others kneel at their feet. A week ago I received a call from people who refused to fully identify themselves. They asked if we could give sanctuary to the woman who walked off the job at a midtown studio. She was Chinese, undocumented, and had to go to the bathroom. She claimed to have worked 12 hours in a row. When her boss refused her a break, she walked off. Ten others in the same business walked off with her. They are now in hiding. I will post an Op-Ed I wrote about this on the web - but for now, consider the concept of painted piggies. Something fun for some and not fun for others. Why? What is the need for pleasure to be hoarded? I doubt that anything like Fair Trade can come until we care about these workers with the same passion that we care about looking good. It's got to be worth 34.00 every couple of weeks for this woman, and her courageous friends, to be safe and free and fairly traded. And I don't even want to go into the chemicals in these places.

We won't get to care if we care dispassionately. Care has to be as much "fun" as a manicure and have some capacity to make us look and feel good. Pain-based strategies don't help painted piggies. Painted piggies are looking for pleasure. Is there pleasure in Fair Trade somewhere? I believe so. There is no need for some women to kneel down in front of others. Just no need.

Another image, one even much less utopian, comes from my Brooklyn car breakdown on Wednesday. Yup, right as I was about to go on the ramp to the BQE. I thought I was bringing somebody home from the hospital and had thus ridiculously liberated my car from a parking space on a day when alternate-side parking rules were suspended. The car ignition died in a less than ideal, said Mrs. White, neighborhood. Most of you know exactly what happened. A Puerto Rican semi driver stopped and pushed the car off the road. "Mommy," said he, signaling that he knew the platinum rule, "don't worry. You ok."

Another 20 drivers not of my race or gender passed by to say, "Mommy, you need help?" By that time, I didn't. I have the gold version of AAA, and they said they were coming. But the "Mommy" as a platinum signal got my attention. They were trying to tell me not to be afraid of them sexually. (I know, maybe if I got my nails done more often, they would have been interested in me sexually.) Instead, they looked at my plight from my perspective, acknowledged it, and comforted me. Several homeless people tried to help me also. Then came the white driver of the AAA tow truck. He hooked us up and I sat in the front seat of the truck with him and his son. We passed a Hasidic wedding. It was just wrapping up and was in the street. The driver went off: "What is it with these people? Fat chance I could get my daughter married in the street. You see what these Jews done to this neighborhood? Money, money, money, that's all it is with these Jews." I smiled and flirted as best as a Mommy can under the circumstances, and lied, "Be careful, now, I'm Jewish." "I don't care, look at these buildings, these people are cutting them up in little pieces, stole all the factories, and are selling them for million, millions. I hope you got some of it, 'baby.'" I had gone from being a mommy to a (Jewish) baby in minutes.

Jackie Gleason is said to have asked the doorman at the Plaza one Christmas, "Who gave you the biggest tip this year and how much was it?" "100.00, Mr. Gleason." Gleason gave him $150.00. "Who gave you the biggest tip last year?" "Mr. Gleason, you did, sir." Note how only money is being exchanged here, not power. Fair Trade exchanges power first and money second. Fair trade admits that we like power even more than we like money and imagines other pleasurable ways to get power than cheating people of real wages.

Summary Message: Fair Trade is human exchange, humanly made. It's not just about bread nor is it just about chocolate. It is about human beings becoming intensely involved with each other, so much so that they can't not care. How do we get to that pleasure, under the circumstances? We follow the lead of the poor, who often know more about how to care than we do. Mommy! We follow the lead of those who walk out and provide sanctuary, the real kind, and the kind that extends the canopy that we have over our heads to as many people as we possibly can. No, I can't find the Chinese women after the first contact. Nor can the others who know about them. They are somewhere in this great city… and I pray that they are ok.

Fair Trade is not just about Jubilee, although rebalancing is a good idea.

Nor is Fair Trade just about tipping, a caricature for tithing as Jubilee tithes justice. By all means tithe - but also flip the switch in your heart. You know tipping: we at least give big tips after we have our manicure done or our car towed or our daughter returns safely from India. It's the Gleason strategy: release a little money but hang on to the power. It's fun but only for a minute.

Nor is Fair Trade about ugly buildings and compelled, legalistic sharing - even if it rightly steals from the rich to give to the poor.

Fair Trade is a tension in the heart, such that you can't see your child eating a candy bar and not see Nestlé's behind it, and another mother's child behind that. Fair Trade is what happens when you give a damn, both about the pleasure of chocolate and the pain of its production. Fair Trade is balance plus, and the plus is the platinum ribbon of fun on the package. It is the extravagance of God's grace, loose in the world of coffee and chocolate. It is Jesus as Bread and Wine at the table to which we soon will go for our Agape meal.

This caring is a form of pleasure that brings you home from a foreign country as a changed person, which is the reason you went there, really, in the first place. You wanted to flip the switch in your heart.

Amen.