What you Probably would Rather Not Hear

I made myself very unpopular with someone the other day.

The lady in question makes “healing jewellery” out of semi-precious stones. I think she sells about R4000 a week. Good business.

Now I’m not one of them, but there are people out there who believe that crystals have curative properties. And being the earth loving, lentil eating, patchouli wearing activists that they are, there is a huge outcry among them regarding unethical crystal mining.

Unethical crystal mining incidentally is where you get a crowd of callous non-vegetarian Mexicans with beards to rip crystals from mother earth using explosives, tractors and cranes.

Ethical crystal mining is done by asking the brownies to grow them in their little gardens after which they are lovingly hand harvested and traded for cow’s milk.

But seriously. Crystal mining comes loaded with ethical problems like child labour, explosive open cut mines and chemical pollution; just like any industry that maximises profits to feed global demand.

I had to ask:

“Are you aware”, I probed gently, “of the ethical issues surrounding crystal mining?”

“Oh yes” she said. “But they’re going to blow the stuff up anyway and as long as I’m not personally doing it…" her voice trailed off here as her thinking scattered into sub-cognitive fog.

Well you can imagine how the rest of that conversation went. But as I was driving home I thought about the general state of things and realised that we are all guilty of this kind of dumbed-down inertia.

Somehow we don’t connect our sushi order with the near extinction of blue fin tuna, now being fished from the worlds oceans at a rate of 20,500 every fifteen minutes. We’re not thinking about the pending water crisis as we flush nine litres of fresh, drinkable water down our toilets every time we go pee pee. We’re not realising that the plastic bottles, Styrofoam containers and bags we see lining our beaches and streets wouldn’t be there if we weren’t buying the soft drinks, fast food and groceries that came in them.

It’s actually bizarre that this kind of cognitive dissonance exists considering that a) most of us care and b) most of us know the drill.

We need to grow up about this and understand that we are not the victims of corrupt big business, or incompetent government. Big business only exists because of our Rand by Rand contribution.

No one holds a burning flame under the seat of your pants to shop at three-layers-of-packaging-Woolies instead of supporting a corner grocer where you can purchase fresh vegetables that come in an eco-friendly cardboard box.  

No one forces you to burn all your lights at night, use disposable diapers, buy plastic toys for your kids, buy soft drinks, buy plastic bags to carry your groceries home in, avoid public transport, swap out your cellphone every two years, print your emails, buy fast food, use your tumble dryer or buy first hand appliances.

We need to realise that we are directly responsible for the dire big picture situation we find ourselves in. It is not the fault of some amorphous “them”. It is our own consumerist apathy that has made things the way they are. We are no longer in a position to assume that things will change without our contribution.

Perhaps we need to stop caring so very much about this and instead, start to look at it in real life terms. Ethics can go to hell. Our ability to curb our consumer mentality is directly related to our continued capacity for survival. 

Simply put, if we don’t understand our contribution to the global crisis on a personal level, if we don’t start changing our choices, we will find ourselves within the next twenty years living in a world where acid oceans, climatic chaos and poverty will be our heritage.