ROTC, Walmart and the art of negotiation

Working at UP is interesting. It's interesting to be a pacifist at a school with a heavy ROTC presence, to be a Mennonite(ish person) at a Catholic school, to be back in the Corporation after a year scrubbing the backs of the disabled. I love my job because I am paid to bring conversation to each of these places of potential conflict. Because these conflicts are particular and personal for me, they have a sepcial relevance for my work.

One "moment" of late was a conversation with the Director of my department, Tom. He's part of Wal-Marts greening intitative. After protestors and lobbyists put a heap of pressure on Wal-Mart, the company formed panels across the country to get it's greening action underway.

Tom's really torn about it. So am I. In the news a few months ago we learned how Wal-Mart fires pregnant employees and won't hire those who were feeble or old because they don't want to pay the insurance bills. They have some of the worst wages and benefits of any multinational and are completely blind to the sweatshop labor which provides their goods.

So they want you to help their stores not pollute the earth by producing less carbon emissions. What's a guy to do?

I have my own struggle. ROTC is a huge place of contention for me, especially at a Catholic Christian school. One of my students recently asked me to help her plan a trip to Fort Benning for the School of the Americas protest/actions. Suddenly there is all this negotiating. How do you be in relationship, in community with our ROTC brothers and sisters and still speak from a place of grave concern? How do we enter the sorrow that there are places we simply cannot travel together? And, perhaps most chilling, what does this mean for us under the banner of the cross?

Our readiness to renounce our legitimate ends whenever they cannot be attained by legitimate means itself constitutes our participation in the triumphant suffering of the Lamb.

This is the John Howard Yoder quote that follows me with these thoughts. They may not sound like very wedding-esque thoughts, but there are so many questions about being well in the world about us at all times. One of the main ones is the difference between acting charitably and acting sustainably. We eventually chose a caterer who didn't have to drive a large gas guzzler an hour to reach us. But we didn't get to support the charitable organization we wanted to. We landed with a local woman who started her own company and was very sensitive to our desire to use local food and wine.

It's great. But these are the kinds of things we turn over in our daily life. But this is the journey! It's birth control and Safeway, Mac computers and NFL football. And we're blessed to be in the conversation, to be together in it.