R-E-S, C-U-E (Fashion Revolution Week)

Fashion Revolution Week starts next Monday

Recently we were watching the 1990's series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, an episode called "The Quickening." Starfleet travellers landed on a planet where everyone was born with a plague, and would eventually die in agony. Starfleet's Doctor Bashir thought he could easily find a cure for the problem, but his attempts at treatment failed. The people of the planet were angry with him, and he felt humiliated by his powerlessness. Near the end, the doctor's favourite patient died in spite of the new drug he had been giving her; but her baby had absorbed the drug and was born free of the disease. The adults were not cured, but their children could be saved.

This story can be read in many ways. It may be about admitting our own arrogance, and the limits of our knowledge. It is also about compassion, dedication, and hope for a better future. One of the biggest points was that nobody could help those already born with the plague; but someone who cared, and who kept trying, could make a difference for the next generation.

Who cares that much about the people of our planet, especially those who get the least attention? In spite of the annual media blitz around Fashion Revolution Week, disheartening stories continue to surface.

"In the wake of Rana Plaza, which occurred months after a deadly factory fire at Tazreen Fashions killed 112 mostly female garment workers, global outrage spurred several international efforts to prevent deaths and injuries due to fire or structural failures. Safety measures were instituted at more than 1,600 factories. Hundreds of brands and companies signed the five-year, binding Bangladesh Accord on Building and Fire Safety ...

 "In a recent series of Solidarity Center interviews, garment worker-organizers from several national unions applaud the significant safety improvements but warn that employers are backsliding. And workers seeking to improve safety in their factories often face employer intimidation, threats, physical violence, loss of jobs and government-imposed barriers to union registration.*

"They have forgotten the lessons of Rana Plaza," Fashion Revolution blog.

*I know the link is incorrect; that's how it was posted on their blog.

Whose responsibility is it to remember the lessons, and to make sure the rest of us do as well? Factory owners? Big corporations and retailers? Consumers? Media organizations like Fashion Revolution? National and local governments?  Religious groups?  Political activists? The United Nations? The workers themselves? At first we may feel far away from both the scene and the cause of such tragedies. But when we do become informed and want to do...something...we may feel like mice with very little power. Especially if we're just the guy holding the broom.


But there are things even mice can do. Ask questions and talk to people, in person or on social media. Find out "who made your clothes." Do some "haulternative" shopping (that includes non-shopping). Read news sources that seem to care about giving true facts (not propaganda). Give Black Friday shopping sprees a pass. Write letters. Make videos. Donate, or give some volunteer hours, to groups concerned with justice in the garment industry, and with the education and health of women and the families they support.

Can't it be this generation that creates hope?

From the archives: Charlotte Mason, and peeling back the veil

First posted January 2014

In one of Ellis Peters' medieval mysteries, The Leper of St. Giles, the diseased beggars living near Shrewsbury wear cloaks and veils that allow only their eyes to show. This encourages rough treatment by others passing by; the beggars are more like shadows or ghosts than real people, individuals, flesh and blood beings.  But Brother Cadfael, reflecting on the times he has treated some of their sores (through his work as the abbey's herbalist), says that he has found sharp minds, unique personalities behind the veils..."by a thousand infinitesimal foibles of character that pierced through the disguise, they emerged every one unique."  He has the gift of seeing what others miss.

In The Living Page, Laurie Bestvater says, "One of Mason's primary purposes for making history the 'pivot' of her curriculum is to allow the child to see the flow of history and to think of himself within it."  She points us to Philosophy of Education, page 273, where Charlotte Mason calls history "the proper corrective of intolerable individualism."  So history, as a way of seeing, cuts us down to size but also shows us where we belong; gives us a place and time but makes it clear that there are other places and times that matter just as much.

But we have to see it.  However we can make that happen, for ourselves and our children.

Quote for the day: the reason for the journey

"To journey for the sake of saving our own lives is little by little to cease to live in any sense that really matters, even to ourselves, because it is only by journeying for the world's sake--even when the world bores and sickens and scares you half to death--that little by little we start to come alive."

Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey

Wednesday Hodgepodge: Spaghetti Dreams Edition

Notes from our Hodgepodge hostess:  "Here are the questions to this week's Wednesday Hodgepodge. Answer on your own blog, then hop back here tomorrow to share answers with the universe." 

1. What's the last thing you did that could be described as 'taxing'? 

Shovelling slushy snow when we should have been seeing dry pavement.

 2. If you could plant a garden of anything, what would be in it? 



Oh, that's fun...real or imaginary? Something to eat? How about...muffin bushes?

Or if you were serious: I would plant some tomatoes, zucchini and peppers, and hope that the bugs and critters didn't get to them before I did. We must be the only people on the planet who don't have much luck with zucchini.

 3. April 10-16 is National Library Week...will you celebrate with a visit to your nearest library? When did you last make a trip to the library? What are you reading right now? What's one title on your want-to-read list? 

I am having trouble even getting to our regular library because of road construction; and the one further away has to be a special trip. So I've been splitting my reading between what's already on the shelf, and the library books I can download for free through Overdrive. But the sun is shining and I might try walking over there today.

On the list of books I don't own, and that I don't think are at our library, is The Singing Bowl, poems by Malcolm Guite. And along with that, I want to actually read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The Apprentice (our oldest) read it for homeschool, but she read it to herself and I never got through the whole thing.

 4. Share a saying or an old wives tale you heard while growing up, you believed to be true or that you paid attention to 'just in case'? 

That eating anything strange before bed would give you bad dreams. It always seemed to come true in stories.

Peter and the Story Girl, so it appeared, had wooed wild dreams to their pillows by the simple device of eating rich, indigestible things before they went to bed. Aunt Olivia knew nothing about it, of course. She permitted them only a plain, wholesome lunch at bed-time. But during the day the Story Girl would smuggle upstairs various tidbits from the pantry, putting half in Peter's room and half in her own; and the result was these visions which had been our despair. 

"Last night I ate a piece of mince pie," she said, "and a lot of pickles, and two grape jelly tarts. But I guess I overdid it, because I got real sick and couldn't sleep at all, so of course I didn't have any dreams. I should have stopped with the pie and pickles and left the tarts alone. Peter did, and he had an elegant dream that Peg Bowen caught him and put him on to boil alive in that big black pot that hangs outside her door. He woke up before the water got hot, though." L.M. Montgomery, The Story Girl

 5. Are you a fan of onions? Garlic? Ginger? What's a dish you love that contains one, two or all three items listed? 

Of the three, ginger. But honey-garlic chicken is good too.

 6. Where does nurturing end and indulging begin? What are some skills or qualities you think a person needs to posess in order to be viewed as mature? 

Some friends and I had a discussion about this awhile ago. Indulging is a parent having to phone their adult offspring's boss to say that said offspring is too sick to come in to work, since if offspring was not living at home, they'd have to do the phoning themselves anyway. Most of us agreed with that, although I was willing to plump for "well, there might be circumstances..."

 7. What leading figure in any field would you like to hear speak, and why? 

Oh, I can think of several writers and thinkers and teachers I'd wish would make a stop by here.

How about Frederick Buechner?



 8. Insert your own random thought here.

We get a NYT section in the weekend paper, and there was a column this week that mentioned the idea of "erasing" people, or groups of people, that we don't like. Not physically killing them, but, perhaps, moving them out of our awareness. We were watching the Mr. Selfridge television series (which I have mixed feelings about, but we're still watching it), and one storyline in the first season concerned a store employee who was let go for petty theft, who then could not get another job and was so desperate that she threw herself in front of an underground train. This caused her co-workers to wonder if they were wrong to try to "erase" this woman from their lives, because of her mistake. One of the best articles I've read this week is Compassion Needs Imagination at the Circe Institute blog. The last church sermon I heard spoke about the definition of grace (shouldn't every sermon be about grace? The Lutherans at least would say yes), and grace definitely includes compassion. The article quotes Atticus Finch and his attempt to define compassion to his daughter:

“If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—”

“—until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

Which, we hope, is one of the things that reading does for us.

Illustration from Many Moons.

Linked from the Wednesday Hodgepodge at From This Side of the Pond.