Thursday, May 16, 2013

The problem with wearing cheap clothes made in Bangladesh...

From the Nation, 
Should I weep, pray, or go naked?

The Price
JOANN WYPIJEWSKI


"A photograph haunts my waking hours. In it a man is curled embracing a woman. His eyes are closed, his head against her chest. Her back is arched, right arm resting on his left, elbow finding a niche in the crook of his arm. From the pose alone, it is as though he had reached for her in his sleep; as though her wrist, bent down against his brow, might bend again, directing her hand to stroke his hair, his face, his bowing back; as though she and he together had paused to feel the beating of their hearts.
                                                   



The Kama Sutra must have a name for their embrace, for it is beautiful and common. But catastrophe and not love is the subject of this scene, for these two are dead.
We don’t know how they lived or what they were called, whether they were lovers or strangers taking desperate hold of each other as the ceiling crashed and the walls came down and a bolt of aqua cloth with polka dots loosened like a winding sheet against their tomb of concrete and twisted rebar.
We know them by their work, as garment-makers; by their workplace, Rana Plaza in Dhaka, Bangladesh; by the date they were killed, April 24, 2013, because factory bosses valued the return on whatever rag they were sewing more than life. We know—because their final gestures were exposed enough to be captured by the photographer and activist Taslima Akhter—that their loved ones were among the first of those mourning the 600-plus dead and were not among those wandering for days near the wreckage carrying tattered hopes and a different type of photo, of faces bright and alive, belonging to the scores who were missing. We know that 2,437 workers, some grievously injured, were pulled from the rubble alive. We know that all who sewed in the eight-story Rana Plaza were paid between $35 and $70 a month; that they belong to the second-largest population of garment workers in the world; that the day before the collapse they heard a rumble, almost like an explosion, as the building cracked, but were called in to work the next day anyway; that the factories in Rana Plaza were among 100,000 in Dhaka, this century’s satanic mills, where women, men and children toil long hours, under brute conditions, at punishing speed, stitching cheap fashions that an American will buy today and toss in the trash next year.
Beware the fabulous bargain, union workers in the US garment trade used to say; it conceals a world of pain.

If the dead bodies of Dhaka seem remote as a concern for sexual politics, that merely reveals how shallow those politics often are, and indeed how limited are the familiar, compartmentalized politics of the progressive brand.

As wails of grief and shouts of protest pierced the air half a world away, there were but a few bleats here. Earnest consumers complained about Walmart and vowed not to buy clothes made in Bangladesh. Some unionists called for safety measures and industry-sponsored factory inspections. Confessors of body politics, meanwhile, were prepping for Masturbation Month (May), or planning a Stronic™ Sex Toy Race for Gay Pride (June), or arguing that maybe police ought to arrest the female fan who tried to fellate rapper Danny Brown onstage, or advertising another academic meeting to discuss the elemental stuff of life in a language intelligible only to themselves.
The dead of Dhaka ought to prompt a deeper consideration by everyone of the punishments of capital, and of the relationship between desire, repression and power.

The two people locked in death’s embrace were workers, but the totality of their life was not contained within the harsh parentheses of their labor. It happens that they were a man and a woman; they might have been otherwise. We mourn them not because of their tools or even because of the manner of their death but because they were human, like us; with desires, like ours, for kindness, justice, pleasure, desires attenuated and finally foreclosed by human systems—cruel ones, but not functioning by fate. Having been made by acts of human will, they can be unmade. It seems necessary to say that.

These two, these 600, the countless unremembered others, might have been people caught in any horror, dead and deserving of our sensitivity. But they occupied a particularly revealing, almost intimate, position in the circulation of commodities. They were terribly poor in a worldwide system that shields us from their poverty and that ordinarily renders them invisible even as it provides multiple, tangible and highly visible signs of their presence: the work of their hands.
And what a work that is! The garment—comfort and adornment, practical necessity and object of allure, medium for self-presentation (why this shirt and not another?), designed to attract, marketed through sex and wrapped up in eroticism if only because of the flesh it conceals.
Before the building in Dhaka collapsed, telephone stands and subway walls near Union Square in New York sprouted ads for H&M. The model, Vanessa Paradis, rises like a haughty Venus in flowery prints within a bower of spring blossoms. She is the face of H&M’s Conscious Collection: “more sustainable fashion,” made from organic cotton and recycled polyester at $29.95 for the faux-jeweled jacket; $19.95 for the sweeping sundress; $9.95 for the flirty blouse.

H&M may not have had subcontractors at Rana Plaza on April 24, but it places more orders with factories in Bangladesh than any other apparel company in the world. Its “manager of sustainability and social issues,” Pierre Börjesson, told the AP last December that the company would not sign on to a plan for independent, industry-financed factory inspections drawn up by the International Labor Rights Forum because safety should be a public responsibility. It’s estimated that the plan would have added ten cents to every garment made by every company if spread out to include all Bangladeshi apparel exports. The ten cents was never the issue, which is why the inspection regime, while beneficial, also hits short of the mark. To keep the rate of profit ticking to the max, someone somewhere has to die, if not dramatically then slowly over years at their machines, if not their bodies then their souls, as cash gets shoveled upstairs and shoppers get a pretty distraction. H&M’s face for summer is Beyoncé as Mrs. Carter: $4.95 for the bikini top.

Almost ten years ago, Tony Kushner wrote an essay for this magazine called “A Socialism of the Skin.” It repays rereading. In part an extended argument with gay conservatives, it is so much more: a political appeal to conjoin the pursuit of pleasure with an active hatred for misery and the structures that require it. The man and woman who held each other as their last act as fellow workers, as human beings and heirs to life, call out to us. Let their epitaph be our standard. They died for capital; we must live and work for freedom, love, solidarity."

Saturday, April 27, 2013

Signs that one has undergone a spiritual awakening

Perusing the list below, I realize I might have a ways to go...

Saturday, April 20, 2013

Hallelujah

Here is a tribute to Boston after the tough times endured this week, starting with the bombs at the marathon :

The rendition of Hallelujah in the video on MLB.com is by a singer who I had never heard of, Jeff Buckley. He died in a drowning accident after releasing only one album, Grace, which included his haunting 'cover' of this song originally written by Leonard Cohen.

And here are the lyrics:
Well I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
Well it goes like this:
The fourth, the fifth, the minor fall and the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

Well your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya
She tied you to her kitchen chair
And she broke your throne and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

But baby I've been here before
I've seen this room and I've walked this floor
You know, I used to live alone before I knew ya
And I've seen your flag on the marble arch
And love is not a victory march
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

Well there was a time when you let me know
What's really going on below
But now you never show that to me do ya
But remember when I moved in you
And the holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

Maybe there's a God above
But all I've ever learned from love
Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew ya

And it's not a cry that you hear at night
It's not somebody who's seen the light
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Two wolves


Native American wisdom speaks volumes to all of us ...

An old Grandfather said to his grandson, who came to him with anger at a friend who had done him an injustice, "Let me tell you a story.

I too, at times, have felt a great hate for those that have taken so much, with no sorrow for what they do.

But hate wears you down, and does not hurt your enemy. It is like taking poison and wishing your enemy would die. I have struggled with these feelings many times." He continued, "It is as if there are two wolves inside me. One is good and does no harm. He lives in harmony with all around him, and does not take offense when no offense was intended. He will only fight when it is right to do so, and in the right way.

But the other wolf, ah! He is full of anger. The littlest thing will set him into a fit of temper. He fights everyone, all the time, for no reason. He cannot think because his anger and hate are so great. It is helpless anger,for his anger will change nothing.

Sometimes, it is hard to live with these two wolves inside me, for both of them try to dominate my spirit."

The boy looked intently into his Grandfather's eyes and asked, "Which one wins, Grandfather?"

The Grandfather smiled and quietly said, "The one I feed."

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Facing the possibility of death sooner than I expected

and how I plan to cope...

So, dear F(friends) and family,

My chronic leukemia has transformed into an aggressive lymphoma with a variable prognosis. Depending on how the chemotherapy I just started works and if I go through a stem cell transplant afterward I could have as little as 4 months to live or as much as several more years. Details on my condition are on my blog My CLLTrail.

So what does death mean to me, a Quaker with more recent tendencies to Buddhism?

For all humans when life is cut shirt there is to be expected a fear and dread of  loss of things we were planning to accomplish and  losing contact with still living loved ones. Another loss for me, less than 3 years from retirement, would be the chance to enjoy a few years of doing something other than my usual work (20 years pediatric practice, 10 years of online medical education), like travel, try writing a novel, etc.

Thinking about death leads me to ask myself what I really believe about God, the soul, and afterlife.

Do I believe in God ? Yes but not the Judeo-Christian Great White Father on his heavenly throne, nor the pagan Mother Earth. Rather an underlying Spirit, more like a life force. Here is where my biomedical training comes in; I really like the concept of biocentrism, more a scientific theory than a spiritual stance, which combines physics and biology and states that life created the universe, not the reverse. 

But other than a wonder at the complexity of life and the unlikelihood of it, and those moments in solitary meditation and prayer as well as in Friend's meetings for worship, when there is a real nonverbal experience of that Spirit, the Inner Light (read here and here if you are not familiar with Quaker "theology"), I often tend toward agnostic thinking. My science background and just going through life, forgetting about God/Spirit seem to be responsible for these frequent lapses, probably many humans do this. And of course, all the hypocrisy and violence of "religious people" - Jews,  Christians and Muslims in today's world. The Right to Life but wars OK crowd and the jihadists....

Do we have souls that live on after our biological death? Does the existence of God necessarily predispose to souls and immortality? Perhaps not. One of my coping mechanisms for dealing with death is to do this Yale open online course, PHIL 176: Death

Then there is the "science" of near-death experiences, the light at the end of the tunnel that people experience. I may do some more reading on this, but as a physician I am skeptical about these episodes confirming the presence of an after-life, could it not just be the effect of low oxygen on the brain?  A bit more intriguing and on my future reading list, is the story about the near after-life experiences of the neurosurgeon, Dr Eben Alexander, who after coming down with meningitis, experienced what sounds like heaven. I am still skeptical though because hallucinations are certainly symptoms that can be seen in meningitis!

But my increasing interest in Buddhism and mindfulness meditation may be the real key for me. If there is to come an afterlife I do think I prefer the idea of multiple reincarnations, landing where karma from the recent life may lead...

Mindfulness meditation based on Buddhism has been used quite successfully in many areas of medicine and also have helped terminal patients face death. From a pre-publication chapter on  Mindfulness for Cancer and Terminal Illness, comes some helpful direction.

In this chapter, mindfulness is defined as "the awareness that arises through intentionally attending in an open, caring, and nonjudgmental way. This definition was meant to take into account mindfulness as both a way of being in the world and as a process or practice."  Here are the ideas behind the apparent success of this program:

The question remains: Why would mindfulness ... as described above, be especially helpful to people coping with cancer?  As it turns out, many of the issues cancer patients face are best dealt with through approaches that emphasize acceptance and awareness, as well as non-attachment.  Non-attachment arises from an understanding of impermanence, the constantly changing nature of all things.  With an understanding of impermanence, patients are able to loosen their stranglehold on needing things to be or stay a certain way, or needing to know exactly the outcomes of their treatments and their prognosis for the future. With a more present-moment stance and through the practice of seeing things clearly as they are, simply allowing acceptance of circumstances, patients are able to stop struggling with questions of “why” And simply dwell in the “what” of each moment.  Worry often arises from questions around the future – these can be attenuated through focus on the present-moment and learning to allow events to unfold moment-by-moment.
Guided meditation holding thoughts of loving kindness has great appeal. From  Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness in the Presence of Death comes some examples of such phrases held in contemplation during meditation:

“May the power of loving kindness sustain me.”
“May I be peaceful in body and mind.”
“May I receive other’s love and compassion.”
“May all those I leave behind be safe and peaceful.”
“May I be free from suffering.”
“May I be free from fear.”
“May I accept my pain, knowing that I am not my pain, not my body, not my illness.”
“May I accept my suffering, knowing it does not make me bad or wrong.”
“May I accept my anger, fear and sadness, knowing that my heart is not limited by them.”
“May I remain in peace, and let go of expectations.”
“ I ask forgiveness from those whom I have harmed.”
“ I freely forgive all those who have harmed me.”
“ I forgive myself for mistakes made and things left undone.”
“May I remember my consciousness is much vaster than this body, as I let go of this body.”
“May I open to the unknown, as I leave behind the known.” 
“May I, and all beings, live and die peacefully.
Great stuff, methinks!

So I plan to read more on this approach, both the clinical mindfulness approach and some Buddhist texts, as I keep working on this form of meditation. I expect these to be very helpful no matter how much time I have left.....

Most importantly I have to be grateful for each day I have, no matter how I feel, no matter the weather, no matter whether at work or play....and keep up my prayer and meditation practice almost compulsively

Try to live each day in complete mindfulness, and expect the rest of my life to be a real adventure to savored.