Simply Chocolate

 Today, inspired in large part by my niece's Easter Basket exhibition, I went to the drugstore and got some chocolate. My family has a weakness for chocolate, particularly Hershey's. Some of my best family memories involve milk chocolate on holidays. 

In recent month -years if we are honest-  we have learned of the unethical ways in which just about every major chocolate company exploits the people and lands that produce chocolate. You can read an article about the coffee or tea industry and get the same story; child labor, slave wages, unsustainable practices, and political corruption in the industry are rampant. 

What has often troubled me is the apathy with which the people who consume this product -who enable these industry practices- view the issue. When they deign to notice them at all. As so many of the problems we now face I think the underlying condition that prevents us from taking action is nostalgia. A problem that is particularly pronounced when it comes to confectionary. 

Simple, innocent, pleasures. As children our first experiences are sensorial and filled with wonder. Have you, dear reader, seen the videos of babies trying bacon for the first time? Or Ice cream? Or lemons? Children experience sensation without subtext. Without context. They try bacon and know nothing of hog farming, or methane emissions, or animal cruelty. And there is no reason why they should, to introduce such cruel realities to a child who is still powerless to effect any sort of change is akin to emotional abuse.

As we grow older we learn that simple pleasures are rarely completely innocent. If it was created by Humans, it was created by choice and choices have consequences. We are about four generations into an industrialized globe, and each generation has seen a magnification of the consequences of our choices. I shall not enumerate the far more than four horsemen that have come in the last decade, but of that host I posit that chief among their number is Nostalgia.

We do not wish for a time in the past as much as we wish for the innocence we had when we were younger. To live in the now without the knowledge we now have. Our parents believe that it was a homogeneous culture that made them happy, My generation believes it was cartoons, breakfast cereal and movies -pop culture. The next is looking for it in Andy Warhol's promised fifteen minutes (Warhol would have loved Tik Tok and Youtube), though they are young yet and something else may turn up.

These desires are ephemeral. At best the are distractions, at worse they make the problem worse as worry turns to fear, anger turns to hate, and hate leads to suffering. (sorry, my generation is obsessed with pop culture, we think in Simpsons quotes).

We are reaching for something we can never have. We must turn our attention to the problems of which we are aware, and try to do what we can in what seems like a hopeless situation. The distractions of Nostalgia are a Fog of War left by the enemies of the Free Peoples. We have the wisdom of age, and can see the obstacles before us.

It is, after all, Easter. A time for Christians when the sins of the past may be forgiven in exchange for a promise to do better in the future. We must accept that the price of peace, chocolate and coffee is eternal vigilance. It is not just about personal responsibility, it is about holding business and governments to account, as well as ourselves and each other. If we are to believe companies to be people, then we must also believe that they can be institutionalized if the present a danger to themselves and others.

I am not saying we should deny ourselves simple pleasures. I am saying we should recognize the cost we pay for them.