Recently fast-food workers have forced the issue of their low-paying jobs into the public spotlight with what has been called the largest strike by fast-food workers in US history. In the process of making demands for livable wages, fast-food strikers are challenging customers to consider the lives of the human beings behind the counters.
The broader public is likely unaware of the unfair and even damaging teaching conditions adjunct or part-time professors are increasingly facing.
Mainstream media outlets and consumers have been understandably quick to take note of the benefits chocolate and coffee offer. Yet most American consumers are ignorant to the mounting evidence indicating that the laborers whom they have to thank for cultivating these products are being grossly exploited.
The enemy of social change is fatalistic complacency.
The “Arab Spring,” wherein the peoples of the Arab world rose up and are still now rising up against dictators, provides us all with a poignant learning moment, that is, if we are paying attention.
Each year, many remember Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s work on behalf of civil rights. Yet the most fundamental piece of his philosophical legacy, his rejection of the utility and morality of violence between individuals and nations, remains at best ignorantly obscured or at worst actively suppressed. In his 1967 book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, Rev. King wrote that "it is as possible and as urgent to put an end to war and violence between nations as it is to put an end to poverty and racial injustice."
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019