Life as Performance Art 15

I am drinking French Colombian Decaf this morning. It is a bit on the pricey side, given that I buy premium quality beans from one of our better local coffee purveyors, Bean Around the World. It isn´t marked as Fair Trade and there is no telling what kind of exploitation and injustice is steaming in every bitter cup. I used to be big on fair trade, and ethically, I still am, but I have had to come to accept that fair trade caters to a niche market of which I cannot possibly be a member, and for one simple reason: I don't earn a lot of money, and fair trade is expensive. In order to provide a fair and just remuneration to all the pickers and other workers, it has to be costly. But I earn less than a living wage and I have bills to pay, and I still want to enjoy a cup of coffee or hot chocolate. I have decided to stop blaming myself for one simple reason. This is not my fault, nor is it my problem, but it is the responsibility of the people who employ me to start paying us a decent and living wage. And so it goes along the entire spectrum of low wage earners. By default we are made party and participants in the exploitation of vulnerable workers, and all because our employers refuse to pay us a decent wage. I have already told a friend who describes himself as frugal that, unlike him, if I have enough cash flow coming in, I can be very loose and easy and generous in my spending habits, and that it's only because of my ungenerous employers that I cannot afford to shop according to my conscience. My regular coffee is fair trade, by the way, and organic. Cuban dark roast. Buying, brewing and drinking coffee puts us in direct contact with the hands and the fingers that have worked day after day, often in hot and unsafe conditions, for long hours, picking the coffee cherries, often for a miserably low wage. It puts us in contact with the people who spread the beans out to dry in the sun, who operate the machine that remove the skins, the hands that clean and sort the beans, and the trained eyes that determine the best quality. We are connected to the people who bag and ship the beans to overseas markets, and then when they arrive to our privileged northern shores, we are still connected to those who drive the trucks that ship the beans to the plants and stores and cafes where the beans are roasted and packaged. The simple act of making a cup of coffee, of cooking an egg, toasting a slice of bread, spreading peanut butter and jam, of slicing and eating a bit of cheese on the side, all these actions put me in contact with a very diverse and often very unjust world, and it is not very far away, neither are any of those people different from me. And unlike them, I can afford to visit them in their country. They cannot come here to visit us in Canada.