Orange Day July 12, 2010

July 15, 2010

Fr. Andrew --

Thanks for your terrific presentation last night at Pat's. Goods of Conscience is such a timely and worthy idea -- I'm delighted to see how fast it has grown into what it now is, and can only hope it will continue to bloom(sday).

Your discussion of the Yeats poem and how we're growing increasingly more distant from the sources of the everyday things of our lives made me think of an essay by George Orwell that I read many, many years ago -- you may very well know it. He talks about a typical evening in a typical English home of his time. People are talking and someone reaches over to toss an extra piece or two of coal onto the fire -- such an inconsequential gesture it's not even noticed. But then Orwell goes on to describe what must take place beforehand for someone to casually toss a coal onto the fire. He was addressing, of course, the dreadful conditions of the miners and their lives. But he tells it without rancor or disdain or diatribe, and it really brings home what you were talking about last night. We don't think about who makes our clothes or where they come from -- much less who made the thread, who printed up the manifest for materials, who made the ink to print the catalogue -- it goes on and on. And it's actually worse than that. When was the last time you saw an empty shelf or clothes rack at Macy's or Saks or the mall. The answer is never, because most of the clothing on display is just so much stage dressing. It's meant to entertain the shopper and enhance the shopping experience -- it was bought and sold without any intention of selling everything. And the amount of unused, unsold clothing is so glutted, it's not even given to the poor -- it just goes directly to rag. So much for the worth of the laborers who toiled to make the clothing, the truckers who delivered it, the clerks who sell it -- and on and on. And the more multi-tasking our society becomes, the less and less we will see any of this the waste -- of material, talent, people, time -- is not simply bad, it is truly immoral.

So -- keep up your good work! It will not change the world, but it wool be there, a testimony to the way we should be living.

Regards,

Catherine