Sunday Story…Make Mine a Cheeseburger

Choices, we all got’em. As a matter of fact I know people who think freedom of choice is all we have. In a spirited discussion the other day a friend of mine argued that freedom of choice was so critical that we should let everyone make their own choices, all the time and they will just have to live with the consequences. To a very large degree I agree with this position. After all in radical responsibility I am responsible for all my choices, even the ones I don’t make consciously. And I am willing and able to accept the consequences of those choices, now, later, and karmically.

The other position is that as a society, a town, a church, a community we get to set the standards we are willing to accept and live with. There are many places in the world where gambling is illegal. And in many of those places it is considered immoral, in other words it is against the code of ethics that the community considers good and safe. In other places gambling is OK, legal and considered by the community a good way to spend time and money. You get to decide. If you do not agree you can try to get the community to change, you can move, or you can just grit your teeth and bear it. It really is up to you.

This is true of every group or tribe you may belong to. There are certain standards that each tribe considers OK. You belong to many different tribes. Each one of them has their own peculiarities. You get to see if you can put up with them or not. If the answer is not then you need to find a different tribe more to your liking or change the standards. It doesn’t, however, do much good to just complain about it.

There are some caveats, though. There was a time when Doctors endorsed smoking, even to the point of suggesting it for pregnant women. Cigarettes were given to soldiers in the meal kits. Cigarette manufacturers claimed there were no ill effects that could be traced to smoking. Some people still believe this. Through advertising and marketing we were led to believe that smoking was OK for us. Today there is a warning label on every pack of cigarettes and we are not bombarded by advertising for that particular product. Yet we can still purchase them if we want, even in light of the fact that if used as directed the product will eventually kill you.

Between the manufacturer and the government we were led down a path of belief that allowed us to make an ill informed choice. Is that really a “free” choice?
Here is another, perhaps more insidious, example. Fast food. Fast food is marketed to children. Then the purveyor of fast food sells food that is not good for you. Yet the advertisement would lead you to believe that it is good for you. The government and its inspectors do not stop the purveyor from making false and/or misleading claims. No one stops the manufacturer from creating a product that appeals to children by using a marketing technique and mascots that are aimed at children. Can a child make an informed choice? Is it “free?” To go even further how can you, as an adult, make an informed choice if the information you are given is incomplete or in some cases just wrong? Is there really a “free” choice?

If you define free as the ability to make a choice between several things then I guess it is a free choice. But it may be a choice that is based on wrong, misleading, or manipulated information. For many years cigarette manufacturers buried studies that proved smoking is bad for your health. Fast food restaurants have been resisting food labeling for m any many years now. Until recently French fries (a vegetable) were supposed to be cooked in vegetable oil making a product that would be OK for a vegetarian to eat. Yet many fast food places added beef tallow to the oil in order to achieve a certain taste. They never told anyone, even though this rendered the product non-vegetarian. There are many people in the world for whom eating another living creature is offensive to their religion and their God. Yet you would never know because the restaurant hid the truth. They actually lied about it for many years.

How can you make a free choice in that case? You really can’t, can you? How can I make a choice if the information is not available? I guess I could choose to believe that I should never eat food that is prepared by anyone other than me. But how do I know the food I am eating is safe? I am relying on some outside body to make sure that organic is really organic, that the beef is not contaminated, and that the drinking water is safe. Yet very often these outside bodies are influenced by the very people and companies they are policing. This is a very sticky wicket.

And it takes us back to the choice that we are making around the community, the tribe, we choose to associate with. If our tribe chooses to make it OK to do things we do not agree with we will have to move, get things changed or gut it out and do our best to create a choice we can live with. I choose to try and make changes. But sometimes it is hard to do. Sometimes it feels like a voice crying in the wilderness with no one to hear. But the other choices are even harder.

Thanks for being part of my tribe. Let’s keep making a difference; it is more important now than ever before.

Namaste
John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”
www.martialartsnevada.com

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