If a Factory Falls in Bangladesh, Does it Make a Sound?

image from Solidarity Center on flickr

This piece was originally published on Medium.

I remember hearing the story of a man who survived 9/11. He raced down the stairs of one of the towers and was in a mall in the basement when things started to collapse—he described the sound of a million tons of steel and concrete roaring down on top of him. Thousands died in that sound. He survived.

His story was a tiny, inexplicable point of light in a black day, an asterisk in a book we’d rather give back, a footnote miracle. The larger story is one we all know—a region made turbulent by fundamentalists and oil money, a global network of extremists, a plan that worked horrifically well. It’s a story of terrorism.

There were footnote miracles in Bangladesh last week after a garment factory collapsed and killed hundreds of the people who make clothes to stock our shelves. Photos show volunteers evacuating survivors on makeshift fabric slides. But the larger story is a building on the brink of crumbling, a country where standards and enforcement are loose, a factory owner competing for the low-margin business of multinational companies, over 1,000 dead, injured, and trapped. This is a story of the global consumer economy. It’s a story, in part, about us.

There’s a happy ignorance we bring to our shopping. Walking through a Walmart or a Target or an H&M we know that all these clothes must have been made somewhere, by someone. We know that ours are not the first hands to touch them. But we don’t ask, and the stores don’t tell, and we’re all fine with that arrangement.

But without knowing the true stories behind products, we’re more likely to shop on price. And when we opt consistently for lower-cost goods we put pressure on companies to source goods at lower prices, and they put pressure on their suppliers, like the factory owner in Bangladesh, who in turn forgoes building repairs and forces his employees to work even when the walls start to crack.

His decisions, of course, are his responsibility. But we have a role in this story. We—each of us agents of the global consumer economy—are the historical force that sets the stage for the play. We are like the New World or King Cotton or Manifest Destiny. We’re a force comprised of a billion little decisions a day. And we each have one big decision to make. We can cover our eyes and let blind market forces trade falling factories for dropping prices. Or we can, slowly through a thousand little, personal steps, figure out a better, more just way of living on this crowded planet.

We’ll probably never completely rid the world of factories like that. But I imagine the sound of the Bangladeshi factory collapsing was a lot like the sound of the World Trade Center coming down—the terrible roar of injustice. And for my part, I want no role in making a sound like that.

photo from flickr

By the 22nd mile of the Kampala Marathon last fall I realized I had reached the final limits of my body. Each further step was a bitter negotiation with my skeleton, my muscles, my neural pathways—they tried to shut the whole system down; I pleaded and commanded and tantrumed to keep it moving, at least one more step, over and over and over.

Yesterday in Boston, before the explosions, athletes far better than me made their own negotiations. At the excruciating frontiers to which marathons push us we struggle not only with our bodies, but with embodiment, our vast souls stuck with these little legs, little lungs, these short little lives. The stride of a runner near the end of a marathon is a practice in transcending the body, a skate along the edge of mortality.

Then some scared and desperate soul set off two bombs, killing three people and injuring almost 200. He (it was almost certainly a he, wasn’t it) wanted to inject death into a day of life, to bring a city and perhaps a country face to face with our own final fragility. To what ends, we don’t yet know.

Tragically he took a few lives, and forever changed some. But death did not win the day. When 78-year-old Bill Iffrig was knocked down by the explosion only yards from the finish line, then got back up and finished the Boston Marathon, it was clear that death did not win the day. And when bystanders rushed into the smoke, dismantling guard rails on their way, to start aiding those who were injured, it was clear that death did not win the day. And when runners finished the marathon and kept running to the nearest hospital to donate blood for the victims, it was clear that death did not win the day.

There is a longer race we all run. And we, too, court our own mortality, a mortality of the human spirit. In this race we are confronted with the boundary between the love and courage that define us at our best, and the waste of fear and violence that lies beyond. Acts like the Boston bombing aim to knock us into our own darkness. It is up to us whether we stop, give up, let death take the story. Or whether we get up, rush into the smoke, and keep running towards love.

(Originally written for and published by Ember Arts.)

Esther and her family live in a small, one-story block of grey concrete rooms in a slum outside of Uganda’s capital city. Laundry hangs in uneven lines across their little compound. When I duck into her sitting room she gives me a big, wry smile and a welcome so wholehearted I hardly know what to do with it. She serves me a Coke. Ugandan Coke, made with real cane sugar, is transcendent.

Not too many years ago, Esther was beaten with the business end of a machete by a rebel soldier. She showed me her big, raised scars. The rebellion drove her and her family from their home, making them, suddenly, poor refugees in their own country. She found shelter in the Acholi Quarters slum and found work crushing stones in a local quarry. The work is grueling, done sitting in the hot sun with a makeshift hammer, and pays, at best, $1 per day. It was all just barely enough to stay alive.

But Esther is not content to just stay alive. Esther is one of those special souls whose dreams simmer near the surface, just behind the eyes, who will keep chasing her dreams no matter what she has to overcome—civil war or otherwise. She started trying little businesses, like selling bananas and charcoal, to get money to send her kids to school. Soon she bought a little piece of the rock quarry as an investment.

These days Esther makes jewelry for Ember Arts and helps lead the other women who work with her. She is building a home for her family and running a couple small but successful side businesses. Her oldest son is in college. Some day, Esther told me a couple years ago, she’s going to buy herself a car and park it in her own driveway. I can’t wait to sit shotgun.

Ember Arts exists to support women like Esther as they pursue and achieve their dreams. We partner with 28 Ugandan women, all survivors of war and poverty, who handmake every piece of our jewelry from recycled paper. And they use the money they earn to chase their dreams: to educate their children, build homes, start businesses. They are transforming the future for their families and communities.

And they are reconnecting with deep, hopeful parts of themselves. People are at their best when they pursue their best dreams. Our dreams are the little white rabbits that we follow, often tumbling, into the color and wonder of life.

Esther chases her dreams, and brings that color and wonder into the world around her. Sipping my Coke in her little sitting room, I think about real cane sugar. And I think about how dreams are like the real cane sugar in our lives. And how people like Esther are the real cane sugar in our world. They show us that there’s something more than just staying alive. They elevate the mundane. They transcend.

My friend Emily lives in Uganda, a 6-foot-tall white girl in East Africa. She has a tattoo on her wrist, on the outside part that would be facing down if you shook hands with her. People ask her about it out of the blue. Sometimes she forgets it’s there and has to bend her arm and crane her neck to look at it before she answers.

“How then shall we live?” it asks.

It’s a question that, taken seriously, is impossible to answer fully. Because a full answer would require a full understanding of the universe and our place in it, something no physicist, philosopher or theologian of any merit would claim.

Nonetheless, it’s a question worth pursuing. And especially now, as there is no historical precedent for many of the choices we face.

Those of us in rich countries live in a strange new utopia, in which basic human needs, and many luxuries, are easier to come by than at any time in the history of the world. Seasons no longer dictate our diet, weather no longer threatens our comfort, even our own disabilities hinder us far less than ever before. But we are neither happy nor content with our historic windfall. And the massive, emergent, global system that delivers this ease of life is upsetting the fragile planetary balance that it is built upon.

Consider climate change. Recent data shows that the Earth is warming exponentially faster than it has at any time in the past 11,000 years, as far back as we can currently study. A few hundred years ago, mankind didn’t have the power to change our planet’s climate so dramatically. Today we do. We are. And we have no idea what the consequences will be.

We live in an unprecedented age. Two hundred years ago there were only about a billion people on the planet. Fifty years ago there were only 3 billion. Today there are over 7 billion. Growth in population, consumption, and waste are so far beyond any historical example that the past is no longer a good predictor of our world’s future.

Some of the smartest people around warn that, within a generation or two, our civilization will imperil itself, our excesses eroding the foundations on which we rest. There will be great turmoil—war, massive migrations, famine and drought.

How then shall we live?

How do we make the choices that shape our lives when we don’t know what sort of world we’ll soon be living in? How do we plan for the unprecedented?

These questions can not be answered fully or with complete certainty. But there seems to me one answer close to a certainty: that staying our present course is foolish. In the face of a mounting tsunami of evidence showing that our way of life is leading to its own destruction, continuing with that way of life, unexamined and unchanged, is a sleepy kind of madness.

So what changes should we make? I see two basic routes here, both of which lead us in roughly the same direction. We can try to change our lives enough to avoid the worst effects of climate change and the other consequences of our global, industrial economy, or we can prepare for those consequences, learning the skills we will need to survive in an economically and environmentally turbulent time.

Both routes lead us towards simplicity, towards weaning ourselves from consumption and living more lightly upon the planet. Both routes lead us towards locality, towards decreased use of cars and planes to transport ourselves and our necessities. Both routes lead us to learn the basic skills of human life: growing food; making, reusing and repairing the basic implements of our lives.

Take my friend Emily. She grows some of her own food, makes her own bread, mends her own clothes. She doesn’t own a car. She recycles. She made me a case for my e-reader out of recycled plastic bags.

If we all lived more like Emily, would we turn the tide on global warming and the rest? I don’t know. But we owe ourselves an answer to the question written on her arm. The way we’re living now will not last, and is cutting a shameful path of environmental destruction through history. How then shall we live?

I’m running my first marathon tomorrow, and everything I’ve learned through the (pretty grueling) training would be perfectly suited to a poster with a bald eagle on it. Things like:

‘Perseverance: Every time you can’t go any farther, just take one more step.’

On any training run over 10 miles there comes a point when your body just starts to stop. This might just happen to me, but I tend to think we’re all made of similar stuff. Your body, on orders from some deep, untouchable part of your brain, just starts slowing down of its own accord, trying its best to stop running, to maybe walk for a while.

I notice it especially when I’ve been distracted by something like a bad memory or a pretty Ugandan girl staring at me from the back of a motorcycle taxi and my mind is elsewhere for a few moments. My body takes the opportunity to start stopping.

When I feel my pace slacken I have to snap back to the present and override that deep, internal command center. I have to shove the big goal of finishing this marathon to the top of my system’s priority list.

‘Goals: The higher you cast them, the further they’ll pull you into the sky.’

In college I once ran six miles. It was down by the beach in Los Angeles, sea level and nearly flat. It wrecked me. I decided that evening I would never run a marathon, or even a half. I just wasn’t constitutionally capable of it.

The training plan I’ve followed has seven runs longer than a half-marathon. The big goal of 26.2 miles makes 13.1 miles doable, even eventually routine, no longer daunting and well on the near side of impossible.

‘Plan: Every towering achievement shines down from a mountain of boring tasks.’

Running a marathon with the body and mind I had six months ago would have been impossible. I knew I wanted to do it, but I didn’t know how to get there.

Hal Higdon, whoever he is, broke down marathon training into a simple daily spreadsheet and put it online: run 3 miles today, 5 tomorrow, 3 again the next day, 8 on the weekend, etc. This became my plan. I followed it every tedious week.

Today I can say I have run half-marathons, I can say I have run 18 mile out-and-back routes to the shore of Lake Victoria, I can say I ran a 20+ mile loop on the savannah backroads of Gulu in northern Uganda. Today I can say I’m ready for a marathon.

‘Potential: You aren’t only who you think you are. That body, that brain, that short precious life, they can be so many things. Inside of you are futures. Hundreds, thousands of futures for the choosing. Futures in which you climb mountains or write books or see Europe or adopt children or run marathons. They can be made real. Like all new creations they will be birthed with pain, with fear, with sacrifice. This is the natural cost, this is what it feels like to make a living, breathing choice against the inertia of the cold universe. It is your tithe to entropy. Pay it gladly. You are not only who you think you are.’

[Update: Went ahead and made that last poster.]