Supporting the Cause

I had my headphones on with the music turned up as I walked through the main corridor of my university. It was a Friday, I was tired, and all I wanted to do was go home and curl up with a cup of tea and a book.

The hallway was unusually busy and as I weaved through the crowd I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around and saw a girl from my women's studies class.

"Glad you could make it," she said, handing me a sign. "If you walk outside and turn left, you'll see the rest of the group."

"Huh?" I said, taking off my headphones.

And then I remembered: The rally. Of course. There had been signs plastered all over campus for a month. I had made a mental note to avoid the bloody thing and still managed to walk right into it.

As soon as I was outside I ditched the sign and hopped on the bus, and received a lot of flack from my feminist classmates for doing so. Some even went so far as to label me a "bad feminist" - whatever that means. While I don't object to rallying, I like to know what I am rallying for or against; I don't jump on political bandwagons (anymore) and I don't like wasting my afternoons walking around and going nowhere, standing up for a causes I know nothing about. While I'm sure some of my classmates attended the rally out of genuine concern many of them, when pressed, revealed to me they did not know much about the injustice they had been protesting. Does that make their appearance at the rally any less important? No - but it is, in my opinion, it difficult for one person (or a group of persons) to implement lasting change without intimately knowing their cause.

The big thing now, in Hollywood at least, is to adopt a child from a third world country. While this will have a lasting (and hopefully positive) change on the adoptee, consider this: In North America it costs an average of $165,000.00 to raise a child (and considerably more if you buy your two and a half year old a $1,700.00 Valentino Handbag. The cost of raising one child in the first world could theoretically provide food, clothes, education, shelter, clean water and health care for twenty impoverished, third world families for over seventeen years. I'm sure the hearts of the "saintly celebs" who adopt poor orphans are in the right place but, had they done their homework (and assuming they are genuinely committed to helping third world nations), they could have made a much larger impact for the exact same investment. But - in all fairness - the latter won't land you on the cover of People Magazine (sorry - I digress. I am in no way implying that some of our saintly celebs use their goodwill efforts to further their own personal agendas, nor am I implying that some celebrities back causes without any knowledge of said cause - Oh wait - I am, but I'll save that for another article).

Seven years ago, I ran a political blog and I used to blabber on about inequality, about media and self-esteem, and about gender discrimination in the workplace, among other things. I would do this from the comfort of my home, as I stuffed my face with food. Being a woman, I assumed I was an authority on all feminist issues - despite the fact that I have never been treated as an ethnic minority, nor am I disabled, nor poor, nor have I been victimized by domestic abuse.

Many of us like to shout and holler and throw our arms in the air about social injustices but the majority of us rarely look at how theses injustices came to be, how men and women are oppressed at every level of society, and how this oppression can reach much farther than our privileged lives in North America.

I look forward to a day where there will be less (uninformed) talk and more (informed) action; it really is difficult to criticize society without an understanding of global issues, and it is hard to support something without a clear understanding of the cause.