The saying goes that money, or more specifically, the love of money is the root of all evil.
Several things have prompted me to consider where we are headed as a society and my conclusion was that greed was the source of many if not most of our ‘problems’. It was then that I remembered the saying and I guess greed and love of money are essentially the same thing.
It seems that we all want something for nothing – best paying job, cheap food, appliances/gadgets, accommodation. We want to earn the most and pay the least. We do not seem to value the effort in producing quality – hand -raised meat, organic food, quality garments and so on.
I started writing this post about a month ago. Since then we have seen a factory collapse in Bangladesh with significant loss of life. I was searching for information about that incident and found this article which shows that this event is far from being an isolated incident.
The recriminations and blame game go on between government, building owners and the corporations who outsource the manufacture of their garments. Do you feel even a tiny pang of guilt about buying products that are made under these conditions? Some say that if we did not buy the items produced in places like China and Bangladesh that these people would not have jobs. Perhaps it would be better for them to have an economy based on sustainable practices that will enhance their way of life rather than being exploited in sweatshop conditions for the sake of us being able to buy a t-shirt for $5.
How do you reconcile what you buy with where it is manufactured and what the ‘real cost’ of it is?