09-17-2013, 01:27 PM
I came across this quote and found it very relevant:
This quote really blew my mind. When I first was aware of the choice, I immediately started to search any way that I was harming others and then adjusting my actions accordingly to my beliefs. There are so many things that we just aren't aware of that are enslaving others.
I would like to name a few and you feel inclined please do so.
Buying non-fair trade Chocolate:
Buying clothes and products from cheap places like walmart:
If something is super cheap to buy, remember there's a reason for it and it's usually not an ethical one. How easy is it to just buy that snickers bar or get a bunch of clothes from Walmart or Gap? It's cheap, right?
These are just a few examples of human enslavement. Now if we view 2D creatures as 'others' we will see that we have tons of going on that many of us participate in everyday. The meat, dairy, and animal skins industry is quite horrific and inhumane. I know I'm going of into a place many here on the forum won't agree with me on, but its still enslavement.
As Ra says it is beneficial in polarizing to seek to find alternative ways of living that don't require enslavement of others. Please add your insight to she'd light on ways that we might be unintentionally enslaving others.
Quote:83.12 ▶ Questioner: Then you say that there are no cases where those who are service to others oriented are using in any way techniques of enslavement that have grown as a result of the evolution of our social structures? Is this what you mean?
Ra: I am Ra. It was our understanding that your query concerned conditions before the veiling. There was no unconscious slavery, as you call this condition, at that period. At the present space/time the condition of well-meant and unintentional slavery are so numerous that it beggars our ability to enumerate them.
83.13 ▶ Questioner: Then for a service-to-others oriented entity at this time meditation upon the nature of these little-expected forms of slavery might be productive in polarization I would think. Am I correct?
Ra: I am Ra. You are quite correct.
This quote really blew my mind. When I first was aware of the choice, I immediately started to search any way that I was harming others and then adjusting my actions accordingly to my beliefs. There are so many things that we just aren't aware of that are enslaving others.
I would like to name a few and you feel inclined please do so.
Buying non-fair trade Chocolate:
Quote:When you take a bite into that luscious chocolate bar, source of ecstatic pleasure, do you stop to think about who grew the cacao that made your chocolate fantasy possible? Possibly one of the more than 15,000 child slaves working on cacao farms in west Africa. Does that chocolate still taste good?
By the way, did I mention that cacao farming has stripped the world of hundreds of thousands of acres of rainforest? Or, that despite the fact that the U.S. alone spends $13 billion a year on cocoa products, many cacao farmers are impoverished?
The statistics are sobering, yet large chocolate manufacturers still insist that, because of the way cocoa is traded at global markets, it is impossible for them to tell which cacao is grown by slaves and which isn’t. Estimates are that up to 40% of cocoa is slave grown. And you thought Abe Lincoln abolished slavery.
Rather than horrify you further with statistics (which hopefully isn’t necessary – hopefully you’ll have already decided that you want no part in promoting such an industry), here are a few options for you.
HOW TO SUPPORT FAIR TRADE CHOCOLATE
1) Look for products that are certified Fair Trade chocolate. When farmers and laborers are paid a fair price for the products they produce, rather than being exploited for cheap labor, that is considered “Fair Trade.” Because they are paid a fair wage, producers can avoid cost-cutting practices that sacrifice quality and are destructive to the environment. For example, Fair Trade chocolate is typically organic and shade-grown, meaning it is grown under the canopy of the rainforest rather than in a clear cut field.
2) Limit, or stop, your consumption of mass-market chocolate. I know that may be hard if you have an addiction to, say, Snickers. All I can tell you is that after having once visited a banana plantation, wherein the workers lived in desolate concrete block houses and worked in the scorching heat, with giant billboards on every corner warning about what to do when overcome by pesticides, I swore to myself never to eat another non-organic banana.
If I am even tempted to, which I’m generally not, all I have to do is put myself back on the banana plantation. Try picturing your favorite 12 year-old working under the grueling African sun and being beaten all day so that you can enjoy your cheap candy bar, and that will make it easier to give them up.
... http://www.facts-about-chocolate.com/fai...chocolate/
Buying clothes and products from cheap places like walmart:
Quote:According to a new National Labor Committee report, an estimated 200 children, some 11 years old or even younger, are sewing clothing for Hanes, Wal-Mart, J.C. Penney, and Puma at the Harvest Rich factory in Bangladesh.
The children report being routinely slapped and beaten, sometimes falling down from exhaustion, forced to work 12 to 14 hours a day, even some all-night, 19-to-20-hour shifts, often seven days a week, for wages as low as 6 ½ cents an hour. The wages are so wretchedly low that many of the child workers get up at 5:00 a.m. each morning to brush their teeth using just their finger and ashes from the fire, since they cannot afford a toothbrush or toothpaste.
The workers say that if they could earn just 36 cents an hour, they could climb out of misery and into poverty, where they could live with a modicum of decency.
In the month of September, the children had just one day off, and before clothing shipments had to leave for the U.S. the workers were often kept at the factory 95 to 110 hours a week. After being forced to work a grueling all-night 19-to-20-hour shift, from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. the following day, the children sleep on the factory floor for two or three hours before being woken to start their next shift at 8:00 a.m. that same morning.
The child workers are beaten for falling behind in their production goal, making mistakes or taking too long in the bathroom (which is filthy, lacking even toilet paper, soap or towels).
In 1996, after Charles Kernaghan and the National Labor Committee revealed that Kathie Lee Gifford’s clothing line for Wal-Mart was being made by 12 and 13-year-olds in Honduras, the resulting scandal and publicity was enough to virtually wipe out child labor in garment factories around the world producing for export to the U.S.
Exactly a decade after the Kathie Lee Gifford scandal, children are again sewing clothing for Wal-Mart, Hanes and other U.S. companies,” said Charles Kernaghan, director of the National Labor Committee. “Children belong in school, not locked in sweatshops. Wal-Mart, Hanes and the other companies owe these children, and must now provide them with stipends to replace their wages and cover all necessary expenses to send them back to school.”
Corporate monitoring has again proved a miserable failure, as Harvest Rich was certified by the U.S. apparel industry’s Worldwide Responsibly Apparel Production (WRAP) monitoring group. Not only did the U.S. companies fail to notice the child workers, the beatings, the excessive mandatory overtime, but also that not one single worker in Harvest Rich was paid the correct overtime pay legally due them. Any worker daring to ask for their proper wages, or that their most basic legal rights be respected, would immediately be attacked, beaten and fired.
“Right now, more than 100 children at the Harvest Rich factory are being threatened with firing,” says Kernaghan, “It is time for the U.S. companies to act immediately, today, to guarantee that this does not happen and that the children are returned to school.”
The National Labor Committee is an independent, nonprofit human rights organization and the leading anti-sweatshop watchdog group in the U.S. The NLC has run successful campaigns not only against Kathie Lee Gifford and Wal-Mart but also on production for Sean “P Diddy” Combs, the NFL, NBA, GAP, Disney, Nike and others. Most recently the NLC exposed the descent of the U.S.-Jordan Free Trade Agreement into human trafficking and involuntary servitude.
http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/lwp/...labor.html
If something is super cheap to buy, remember there's a reason for it and it's usually not an ethical one. How easy is it to just buy that snickers bar or get a bunch of clothes from Walmart or Gap? It's cheap, right?
These are just a few examples of human enslavement. Now if we view 2D creatures as 'others' we will see that we have tons of going on that many of us participate in everyday. The meat, dairy, and animal skins industry is quite horrific and inhumane. I know I'm going of into a place many here on the forum won't agree with me on, but its still enslavement.
As Ra says it is beneficial in polarizing to seek to find alternative ways of living that don't require enslavement of others. Please add your insight to she'd light on ways that we might be unintentionally enslaving others.