coke i like

i woke up early to go work today, and along the way i found out that i should have just slept in.

an activist approached me, even though i was bobbing my head up and down, side to side, and singing to moxy fruvous' king of spain. she handed me two sheets of paper, one yellow, the other one green. she mentioned something about coke and something about killing coke and something about a chapel and that the green sheet will tell me why the chapel has to kill coke.

the green sheet talks? wow, that's new.

i said thank you and walked away with two pieces of paper, one green and one yellow, on my left hand. the moxy fruvous song finished, so i thought i'd spare the two second gap between that and the next song skimming through the green paper. a chapel killing coke would be wicked.

the thing about trying to comprehend what people around you are saying when you have those white earpods on and volume cranked up and all that exists in your head is the lyrics, is that you can pick up most of the important keywords, but not enough to be able to make sense of the entire message. sometimes, even the keywords you can pick up get so skewed that they alter the entire message one-hundred-and-eighty degrees.

she lied.

the green sheet did not tell me anything. i had to read.

i waited for about three seconds for it to start talking, but all it did was nothing. so i started reading because this is supposed to be one of the days i would pretend to be a nice person.

coca cola abuse of the global public interest, the title said. where's the chapel killing coke?

in 2001, a lawsuit was filed against coca-cola by the international labor rights fund and the united steelworkers of america on behalf of SINALTRAINAL (union representing coke workers in colombia), several of its members and the estate of isidro gil, one of its murdered officers.

the lawsuit charges that coca-cola's bottlers in colombia "contracted with or otherwise directed paramilitary security forces that utilized extreme violence and murdered, tortured, unlawfully detained or otherwise silenced trade union leaders."

the seriousness of the situation is best summed up by SINALTRAINAL vice-president juan carlos galvis, who stated: "if we lose the fight against coca-cola, we will first lose our union, next our jobs, and then our lives."

other crimes and abuses by coke include:
~ overexploitation and pollution of water sources in india, mexico, ghana and elsewhere
~ benefiting from hazardous child labor in sugar cane fields in el salvador
~ aggressive marketing to children of nutritionally worthless and damaging products (thought to self: huh?)
~ anti-worker policies
~ history of racial discrimination
~ opposition to environmentally-sound bottle deposit bills
~ fraudulent business practices

my only counter-argument: but i like coke.

my second thought: what the hell? there's no chapel being mentioned.

i am not ignorant. the very fact that i took time to blog this whole spiel, only to counter-argue it with four words that expressed my ignorance is proof enough that i am not ignorant. but let's face it: pepsi does not taste as good as coke, and britney spears made pepsi advertising even worse.

not that i'm saying this whole thing is horseshit. i wouldn't know, would i? i've never been to india, mexico, ghana and elsewhere to witness such overexploitation and pollution of water sources. i live in san diego, and we have enough water pollution and overexploitation already. i've never been to the sugar cane fields in el salvador to witness the hazardous child labor. and i don't even know why the hell they would mentioned such a thing as coke being nutritionally worthless and damagin, when 90% of the food we have here in the united states is basically nutritionally worthless and damaging. the other 10% is nutritionally worthy and not damaging, of course, but they just don't taste as good.

if there is one thing i learned from that one horrible physics TA alex winbow, it is that iceberg lettuce contains no nutritional value whatsoever. and even that might very well be an incorrect fact, since it came out of his mouth.

think about it. who did not do the things listed above? i'm sure all soda companies did. as well as shoe companies, food companies, clothing companies, car companies, and the rest of the companies that exist in the world today. maybe they don't need sugar canes as much as coke does, but they overexploit people or natural resources one way or the other. why attack coke specifically? isn't that rather discriminatory? always go for the bigger picture. bring down all these companies once and for all so we can claim ourselves humanitarian and end sufferings in the different parts of the world. if that happens to fail, THEN maybe we can go for something smaller. like coke or microsoft.

or maybe that failed already?

humanitarians, what you should be focusing on bringing down right now is not the big companies, but the future companies that have yet to exist. yes, BUSINESS PEOPLE. everyone who has taken the most ultra-basic elementary course in economics know that it is the main economic (if not psychological) principle that you always go for the bare minimum effort to get the maximum result. it's just how you do business. if it were to be otherwise it wouldn't be called business, it would be called something else. even we physicists employ this principle by believing that we are smart enought to not study before an exam and still aim for an A+. this very basic principle is what lead to capitalism, and most of the time, success. if people have not been following this principle since the day the decided to come down from the trees, we would not have the privileges we have right now. there will be no advancement, no new technology, no one piece, and no internet, which i am currently using to blog this.

i lived in indonesia for sixteen years before i was catapulted up to LA. by zarquon, i had never even realized during that sixteen years that making shoes for nike was considered exploitation since all the kids who were doing it looked perfectly happy to me. they got even happier because nike only shipped back to the US products that are considered "perfect" and threw away the ones that did not pass the standard requirements. the shoes might have a little chip at the bottom, or the seams might be crooked, but nothing else put as big of a smile on those kids' faces when when they go to school or play soccer wearing these "poor quality" products. from our americanized standards it might be considered exploitation because a burger patty with two buns and a thin slice of tomato and lettuce here costs $4 at the very least. in indonesia, a full plate of rice with meat, vegetables, egg, and a glass of cold lemon tea costs 35 cents at most, and it tastes a lot better than that $4 burger. if they were to be paid the minimum wages we have here, there will not be enough veggies and cows to satiate their gluttony. worse, the price will start rising to the standards we have here, and they're nowhere close to being ready for that. last time the prices rose up too high, houses were burned down, chinese people were massacred, women were raped, and the president was overthrowned. can you imagine how catastrophic it would be if the prices were to increase, AND the cows and veggies were gone?

again, call me ignorant, but i think using these excuses is like telling me that children in africa are starving when i don't finish my corn on the cob at a fastfood restaurant. they can have it for all i care, but i am perfectly full, and stuffing the rest of the cob into my full stomach isn't going to make those kids feel less hungry, thank you.

in fact, here's a solution. let's send our people to el salvador so they can work in the sugar cane field. that way we don't have to pay them as much because the standard of living there is definitely much lower than it is here, and we can leave the exploitation of these little kids to their parents. ask around and see how many people you can get to go. i bet not enough to even cover half a small sugarcane field. it is a fact that you can't deny, provided that you've been to downtown sandiego, or any big city downtown for that case, that people would rather sit in the shade, beg, and get enough change to make sure that they're not starving that day. and if it was a good day, maybe they even have more that they can save to buy an ipod. face it. none of us want to do this dirty work. i bet even the activist who handed me this flyer wouldn't be willing to fly to el salvador to work at the sugarcane field, even if i were to pay for her flight.

i mentioned in the above solution that the solution will work so we can leave the exploitation of children to their parents, and you jumped off your chair yelling: WHAT? it's true. in third-world countries, parents make their children work at early ages, that way they can get more crop in, and hence more money. they even arrange their children's marriages at early age, fourteen or fifteen, so they can make even more kids to help them in the field. it's not a surprise that people in a third-world country can have fifteen kids, who each have fifteen kids. if i have a cornfield and two-hundred-and-twenty-five descendants, i think i'd just sit back and play some guitar and make love to my wife so i can make more kids who can make more kids.

last time i checked my highschool history textbook, even the CIA used extreme violence to bring the so-called "peace" in other nations. one that i remember in particular is nicaragua and el salvador, because saunders always said nicaragua and el salvador in a wonderfully weird way. i guess they just want the sugar cane, and not really the peace. just like how they just want the oil in iraq and not the peace.

please people, take care of your own business first before you try to deal with others'. if you really want peace that bad, start from your home. you don't start in san fransisco with five hotels and seven houses when you play monopoly; you start in square one with zero hotel and zero houses. i truly see no point in going to other countries to end exploitation or make peace in any way when we still have endless problems here.

and one of the many problems would be the activist who ruined my groove and now i am going to have to play moxy fruvous's king of spain all over again.