I concluded by pushing for a return to a more communal mindset, describing a vision of a neighborhood where neighbors actually talk to each other and aren’t afraid to ask for help when it’s needed—and a call for Christians to be the initiators in this, to be the ones to ask to borrow tools instead of making a trip to Lowe’s every time they need something they don’t have, and to freely offer of their resources to others.

Great, right? At least that’s how I envisioned it in my head. But I never posted it. The words didn’t fit together, the tone was all off, and I just wasn’t able to say what I wanted to say. I regularly spend three or four hours a week writing and fine-tuning the things I post here, but after about five hours with that one I still had nothing. So “Interdependence Day” just sat in a notebook for awhile as July 4, 2009 came and went, and with it my opportunity for a timely play on words.

About a month ago we had new neighbors move in next door: a mom and dad in their 30s, their two kids ages five and six, and the kids’ grandparents, every one of them very outgoing and friendly. Especially the kids, and especially the six-year-old.

Every time he sees me outside, he asks if he can come over and help me with whatever I’m doing. (Can I bring my skateboard over, too?)

If I’m not outside, he’ll knock on my door to ask me for help with something trivial, like cutting up and peeling an apple. (I can’t eat the peel because I have a loose tooth and it might fall out.)

He saw that I was grilling shish kebabs the other day and he asked me for the recipe. (Oh, and can we borrow those metal sticks too? I don’t think we have any of those.)

In short, he’s making me be my ideal interdependent neighbor. He’s forcing my generosity, and the worst part is that my first reaction is often reluctance rather than the limitless charity I want to be known for. I’m sure his parents have skewers for grilling, but why did I tell him that instead of just saying they could borrow them any time they wanted?

So I’m learning. In retrospect, I think that’s why I wasn’t able to get the words out last year: I didn’t have any experience to back up my grand calls for reform. Maybe next year I’ll have something to say. In the mean time, the kid already invited us over to dinner. I need to step up my game.

So this past weekend at the Plaza in Kansas City, I was sitting on a bench with my friend Kyle when two people in their early twenties came up to us carrying a stack of literature. It amused me afterward that my first thought was to wonder what movie they were promoting. It turns out they were just evangelizing.

If you could call it that. Reading from a Chick tract, they explained to us the emptiness of worldly pursuits such as backbiting and whoremongering. After that, one of them asked if we drank alcohol. We answered factually that we did. He then asked if he could pray for us about that. Kyle said No. I don’t want you to pray for me because you don’t know me and I don’t know you. I’m Kyle. What’s your name?

And so we talked. We talked for about ten minutes. Jake told us he was a brand-new intern at a local missions organization who had left everything behind in Indiana when he recognized that the environment in his hometown was restricting his growth as a Christian. He also learned that Kyle and I were Christians and not in any way alcoholics. He ended up praying that God would give us signs and visions and went on his way.

The word evangelize comes from the Greek word euangelizo, which means “to bring good news”, and Jesus’ good news was always “Repent, for the kingdom of God is near” (see Mark 1:14-15). It had little to do with saving us for the sake of freedom from sin, and much to do with preparing our hearts for the inevitable arrival of Jesus’ future kingdom.

But here I am using rhetoric to excuse my inaction, as I often do. I can pick apart their methodology all I want, but they were spending their Friday evening in faithfulness to God. I, on the other hand, didn’t proclaim the good news to anyone.

This one was originally posted February 10, 2007.

I have been working retail for the past four years, putting myself through school and gaining valuable insights into the human nature. From day one at Hy-Vee back in 2003, all the way to Target in 2007, it has been for me nothing more than a means to an end. I needed a job to help out with college expenses, and they needed a faithful worker that they could underpay, and that was the extent of our relationship.

I knew from the start that I could never actually make a career of it. It was just a feeling I got when I thought about myself in ten years, still putting cans on shelves and showing customers where the macaroni is. But I never really understood why.

Last week I brought my 1910 hardcover copy of Pensées to work so I could read it during my breaks. With all the wedding planning, and working two jobs, I haven’t had much time to read. (I started it way back in July.) And as I sat reading a book that was printed nearly a hundred years ago, filled with words written before 1662, it hit me all at once that I was holding the oldest thing that has ever been inside the walls of the building.

Target rotates the sales plans about every three months and clearances out all the “old” merchandise to make way on the shelves for whatever new items are coming in. There isn’t a single thing in the whole store that is more than a year old. Even the building itself was constructed in 2001.

I finally realize that this is why I have always hated retail so much. Its sole focus is new. Something that is three months old must be replaced with something new because it’s not new enough. If a package is opened, we can’t sell it because it’s not new anymore. Old stuff doesn’t sell very well, isn’t popular enough, so it has no place there.

When Paul went to Athens to proclaim Christ, the city’s residents were described in this way: “All the Athenians and the foreigners who were there spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing.” When I hear my coworkers spend most of their conversations talking about the latest movie or a new restaurant, I realize that things haven’t changed much. We are a consumeristic society: We consume newness, in the form of new ideas, new products, new news.

What a contrast: God spent a fifteen hundred years writing a book in such a way that it would stay applicable for at least two thousand more, having no need of a replacement until everything in its pages has come true.

I put in my two weeks’ notice at Target last Saturday. I start work at SMART Public Safety Software down on Main Street in Cedar Falls on the 19th… I guess I just needed something new.

Today, information is so easily transported that it has almost no value at all. I can turn on the television and hear about foreign elections, trainwreck celebrities, collapsed mineshafts, topsoil erosion, and dozens of other things that are happening right now; and while some of these news items are very serious, they won’t change what I plan to do with my day.

In his prophetic book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman describes an idea called the information-action ratio, which is a measurement of the correlation between the things we learn and the things we do. He argues that with the technological advancements in the past 150 years—the telegraph, the telephone, and the television—this ratio has changed drastically. (The Internet was still about ten years away when he wrote the book, but it’s probably had a bigger effect than the other three combined.) We now know a lot more about what goes on in the world, and we do much less with what we know.

Information has become just another commodity in a capitalist system, and it must compete to get our attention. Most of the information that is delivered to us via headlines, blog posts, or the evening news had to fight to get there. As a result, most interesting has replaced most useful as the measure of the value of information—not what’s worth knowing, but what will get the most viewers or mouse clicks. This is paradoxically both the effect and the cause of the imbalanced information-action ratio.

We are told that as responsible citizens, it’s good to be informed. And this is true to the extent that the information affects what we do or how we live. But I’ll go on record as saying that it is not good to be too informed. Information that doesn’t affect our actions is worthless, and there are much more important things that God would have us fill our minds with than the endless cycle of novelty.

For my own part—we don’t own a television or subscribe to the newspaper, and I wrote a custom Firefox extension to hide the news headlines from Yahoo Mail. I just couldn’t handle it anymore. My working theory is that any news that’s important enough for me to act on will find its way to me some way or another, and that’s proven accurate in the last six months since I started limiting my information intake.

I mention this not because I want to sound superior to anyone, but because I thought it was important to show that all of the above information actually has affected my actions. Other people probably deal with information differently than I do, and these extremes may not be necessary, but this is how I decided to attack the problem of infomation overload.

Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living toom, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses, took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, pp. 75-76

Marketers know what we want. There is hardly an industrial-grade fast-food burger that is not advertised with images of dewy, plump tomatoes, wholesome bread straight from the oven, some kind of premium beef. The reality of flaccid vegetable matter, a soggy bun and tasteless meat is, of course, rather different. But that’s not really news—jokes about fast food that doesn’t look anything like the commercials aren’t even funny anymore. What is significant is that we are so mesmerized by the promise of fresh, wholesome food that we can be tricked into eating something else. Packages wouldn’t be decorated with images of traditional farms and contented animals, and commercials wouldn’t depict chefs and italian grandmothers carefully tasting this or that “authentic” recipe, if these weren’t the things we all think of as important.

The desire for food grown and prepared with care is not elitist or limited to a band of hippies. It’s what we all want.

Similarly, just as no one says they want tasteless, truck-ripened vegetables or feed-lot beef, no one deliberately plans a rushed meal. And yet, again, that is what we end up eating, wolfing down burgers in our cars or slurping a plastic tray of microwaved pasta as we stand hunched over the kitchen sink. Fast-food companies rarely show lonely people eating in their cublicles at work, or solitary figures heedlessly munching as they watch television at night. As usual, the marketers seem to know what we really want: they show smiling families gathered around the dining-room table. Talking, laughing, spending time together. If marketers know what we want, why don’t we get what we want?

In other words, we’re promised one thing, and we get something else. We end up gulping down food of dubious provenance when what we really want is to linger with friends and family over a meal of fresh, wholesome ingredients, carefully prepared. Fast food is sold to us on the merit of its illusory resemblance to Slow Food.

—Jeff Crump, from the introduction to Earth to Table: Seasonal Recipes from an Organic Farm

Ryan met me in the parking lot of the Family Video on a Saturday afternoon. We went inside carrying chairs and popcorn, set them up in front of one of those corner televisions in the back, and watched the movie that was playing as though it was our living room. After a half hour, once enough people had cycled through the store to give me something to write about, we packed up and left.

I was a high school senior, and my AP Psychology assignment for the chapter on mental illness was to go to a public place and do something deviant while paying attention to the reactions of the people around me. It was open-ended: we could choose to do whatever deviant act we wanted, and there were no guidelines other than the standard “stay within the confines of the law”. The assignment itself was a one-page paper about the experience.

It taught me something very important about what it’s like to be different. You may have the idea that people who are different get a lot of stares from others, but it’s not true. There wasn’t a single person who looked at Ryan and I for the duration of our deviance. They all walked around us, stiffly and awkwardly pretending everything was normal, as though it was normal to avoid eye contact at all costs.

No, a person who is different usually lives a life of isolation. We notice him in a public place, and these thoughts pass through our minds almost simultaneously: Something’s wrong with him. Act like he’s normal. Don’t stare—he probably gets that a lot. He’s just as much of a person as you are. Don’t let him know that you know he’s different. Just look straight ahead and keep walking. And in trying so hard to prevent him from feeling conspicuous, we make him invisible. I experienced this for a half hour. I can’t imagine a lifetime of it.

Is normal anything more than a democratic idea? I’m only normal because there are more people like me than there are like him. But I have a dozen disabilities of my own. ]]> http://kevin.vandekrol.com/entry/089/feed 0 http://kevin.vandekrol.com/entry/economic-counter-protest http://kevin.vandekrol.com/entry/economic-counter-protest#comments Wed, 09 Dec 2009 04:28:03 +0000 Kevin http://kevin.vandekrol.com/?p=133 I came across this yesterday and it’s been running through my mind ever since. It seems that the idea of “economic counter-protests” has been catching on as a good way to fight against Westboro Baptist Church.

The way it works is this: If Westboro decides to picket an event or place with their inflammatory signs, someone will set up a pledge fund in the area, getting as many people as possible to pledge one dollar for every minute Westboro pickets. Then after the protest, they will donate the money to the organization that is being protested, or else a charity that represents the cause. They will refuse to show up to counter-protest in person, instead leaving only a sign that informs the Westboro protestors of the pledges: the longer they protest, the more money goes toward that which they protest.

Most of WBC’s protests are against pro-homosexual organizations. I have already made clear my position on homosexuality, but this forced me to ask myself what I would do if Westboro came to Des Moines. Would I donate to an organization that I may somewhat disagree with in order to fight against a group that I disagree with much, much more?

I wonder to myself what Jesus would have me do, and in the midst of all of the answers that fill my thoughts—”fight!” “stand up for your beliefs!” “no compromise!”—I hear one that could never have come from within: “love them all.” I still don’t know what this means or how to do it, but I know it’s the right answer.

This is a form of what a psychology textbook would call egocentrism. It means that I interpret the world based on myself first of all. The term is usually used to refer to a developmental stage in infants where the baby thinks that his mother doesn’t exist if he closes his eyes, but I think that in some small capacity we never grow out of it. When our basic needs are met, when we never once in our lives have to wonder where the next meal will come from or where we will stay that night, it’s easy to believe subconsciously that the same is true of everyone. (Even here I assume that this is true of everyone because it’s true of me.)

My own theory is that this is a defense mechanism. In America we are assaulted every day by stories and statistics telling us all the things we need to care about: AIDS, corporate corruption, dirty water, drugs, endangered species, exercise, high fructose corn syrup, poverty, sustainable agriculture, topsoil erosion. It’s too much. It leads to cultural apathy. I can’t possibly fix any of those things, so I can’t allow myself to care. Any time I hear of a new disaster, injustice or social problem, my first filter is, Does it affect me? Does it have an immediate impact on my life, or will its consequences not come to pass until after I’m gone? And this determines whether I think about it constantly for weeks and months or whether I forget about it in a half hour.

The brain is wired to cause us to focus primarily on the problems that are directly in front of us. It has to be this way. If we understood the true extent of human suffering in the rest of the world, we would never be able to buy anything or complain about our circumstances; we would never be able to be happy or content with anything, because life is so hard for other people. Because this knowledge would ruin our lives, we convince ourselves that it’s not real. All of it is relegated to a statistic, a mere fact, and set on a shelf next to all the other things we know are true but not real. This is the only way we could function in life.

But the biggest factor in our chronic unawareness is how far removed we are from all of the suffering. Most of it is in other countries, and the biggest problem America has—poverty—we are very good at hiding. The poor people do not live on the same streets or go to the same stores as the rich people; as the leaves fall from the trees, the homeless communities with their brightly-colored tents are ordered to evacuate the forests near the river; and the projects are always far from a major highway so travelers will never see the worst of it.

You have to go looking for it. It will not come to you. But it’s there.

I enjoyed the Whopper Junior until I found out that last part, watching the documentary Food, Inc. and reading the book In Defense of Food (both of which I recommend). After seeing what happens in those meat-packing plants and reading about how the industry really works, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to eat one with the same enthusiasm. This is the burden of knowledge.

Let me stop here and switch gears. As soon as I hear someone talk about “the hidden side of the system”, the conspiracy alarms go off and I assume a skeptic’s posture for the remainder of the article or conversation. I assume that most others are the same way. So rather than linking to videos and using sensational language to explain that it really is all that bad, I’ll use only a few general facts along with observations about human nature to demonstrate why it should be all that bad.

1. Humans are sinful. We are rotten to the core, and we will corrupt any system if we have the opportunity and are able to avoid consequence. (I could stop here.)

2. The industry is mostly hidden. Everything they do is behind closed doors, in food processing plants without windows. In the rare cases that a non-employee is allowed inside, photographs and video cameras are strictly prohibited. Because of this, they are not accountable to their customers. I am not allowed to see what happens to my chicken from the time it is hatched to the time it arrives in the store.

3. Their oversight is powerless. In 2001, a court decision revoked the USDA’s authority to shut down a plant for failing too many health inspections. Though there are bills in the Senate to restore this authority, none have been passed yet. Because of this, the USDA cannot enforce its own safety standards, and the meat-packing industry is not accountable to anyone.

4. It’s a business. Any well-run business has one primary objective in mind: to make money. Everything else is secondary. The food industry does not exist to feed people; they exist to maximize profits by way of feeding people. It follows that such factors as nutrition and long-term health are less important than the immediate impact on profitability. The people in charge will tend to make the most cost-effective decision, even if it is at the expense of health.

This is not unique to the meat-packing industry. These four criteria—sin nature, lack of accountability, lack of authority, and love of money—can be used to predict the integrity of any system, whether it’s a business, a non-profit, a church, or even an individual.

Why does all this matter? Joel Salatin, a very outspoken “back to basics” farmer in Virginia, takes this perspective:

God actually loved us and provided a salvation experience for us that shapes the way we should, with the same grace and appreciation and respect, honor the creation that God made. It’s in respecting and honoring the pigness of the pig that we create our ethical and moral background for respecting and honoring the Tony-ness of Tony and the Mary-ness of Mary. And so it’s how we respect and honor the “least of these” that creates a theological and philosophical framework for how we respect and honor the creation that God made.
(From an interview in Sojourners Magazine, December 2009)

In other words, if they don’t respect the pig then they won’t respect the person who eats the pig.

This is reality. And yet, like all things that break the status quo of my life, it will probably fade back to normal after a few months, as TIME separates me from the experience. I will be reminded of the harmony of the lettuce, pickles and onion in a Whopper Junior, the mayo, the ketchup with no mustard, and I will convince myself that it couldn’t be as bad as I thought it was. But it still is.