Our friends at Love146 are calling for an active boycott of Craigslist. This really breaks my heart, as I spend at least 20 minutes most every day browsing through the jobs, barter, real estate, for sale, and missed connections sections. Missed Connections is a sometimes funny, oftentimes heartbreaking section of the site. People post love letters to strangers that they missed their chance with. For example:"Yesterday you were walking out of Wal-Mart as I was walking in. You were with your friend and had blue shorts on. His shorts were red. We made eye contact,but I didn't talk to you because I wasn't wearing makeup. If you see this, write back and let me know what color shirt I was wearing so I know itsreally you."The humor in that is that adults are getting hung up on people that they saw for less than ten seconds and are desperate to find them. What is heartbreaking is that people are so lonely in their lives, so desperate to feel loved, that a sidelong glance from a passing stranger is their greatest hope. Why are so many so lonely? Why aren't we being Jesus' hands and feet and more?
The ordinary radicals over at the simple way, an amazing group of people dedicated to community and love, have come up with a few suggestions on how we can live with each other, instead of just next to each other (note: i'm stealing this list verbatim, check their site for more).
- Go out to eat with someone who is homeless, or invite them to your home or
cafeteria to eat with you. - Leave a random tip in the college bathrooms for the folks who clean them.
- Find out who makes the clothes for the athletic department and if those companies reflect the values of Christ.
- Learn to sew and begin making your own clothes.
- Start tithing 10% of all income directly to the poor (relationaltithe.com).
- Connect with a group of farmworkers who grow food for your cafeteria or
favorite restaurant (such as Taco Bells Immokalee workers ciw-online.org). - Give your winter coat away to someone who is colder than you are.
- Ask to see the budget of your school. What do the workers get paid compared to the administrators? Make sure folks know -- if you are proud of this, affirm the folks who make those decisions... If not, begin a conversation with both workers and administrators of how this could be better.
- Ask where the campus gets its energy. Is it renewable? If not begin a plan for moving toward renewable energy (talk to folks at Eastern University about how they have
done it by an optional ecological tax that is tacked onto tuition -- it's only a few dollars per student). - Write one CEO a month -- affirm or critique the ethics of their company (you may need to do a little research).
- Write only paper letters for a month (go computer free)
- Try sitting in silence for 15 minutes a day.
- Kill your TV -- or go TV free for a year.
- Go down a line of parked cars and pay for the meters that are about to expire...
- Leave a little anonymous note of niceness.
- Beat a war machine into a plow, without hurting anyone of course (Isaiah 2:4) -- NOTE: you might want to plan on a little sabbatical after this one, a little reading and writing retreat -- in jail.
- Write to one social justice organizer or leader each month, just to encourage them in their work.
- Experiment with a post-oil era by going fuel free for a week -- ride a bike verywhere, carpool, walk or hitchhike.
- Gut your TV and turn it into a pot for a plant.
- Try reading only female writers for a year (since many of our problems seem to be stemming from men).
- Go to a retirement home and ask to visit a few old folks who don't get any visitors.
Spend some time with someone who cleans the campus, get to know each other,
share your stories. - Invite one of the college cafeteria staff to your home for dinner or go to their home.
- Try jack-hammering the church parking lot to make space for potato plants.
- Track to its source one item you eat regularly.
- Give your car away to a stranger.
- Convert a diesel car to run off veggie oil.
- Try flushing your toilets off dirty sink water (for a little guide, check here).
- Buy only used (thrift) clothes for a year.
- Cover up all brand names, or at least the ones that do not reflect the upside down economics of God's Kingdom.
So, there. I digressed a bit from my point, but that's not a bad thing. Love is the answer, that's what we're getting at. Back to Love146. They're a group dedicated to waging peace (waging war never seems to work, does it?) against global child prostitution rings. Specifics at their site (including petitions, factsheets, etc), but the idea is that craigslist, in their "casual encounters" section, unwittingly (let's hope) facilitates child trafficking. They've contacted craigslist multiple times about cleaning the site up, and after no response by the deadline of this past new year, a boycott has been called for. Like I said earlier, I really enjoy the networking craigslist offers, but there's few things I enjoy more than a bit of revolution (justified and peaceful revolutions of course).
So as of now, you're all my witnesses. No more craigslist for me. Maybe you too? It might be a bit inconvenient, but so is being an eight year old girl who gets raped. Lets not be lukewarm.
