Confession: \u00a0I just contributed to the \u201ccollateral damage\u201d of which I am a part. \u00a0I bought my wife Valentine\u2019s Day flowers from proflowers.com. \u00a0I am a horrible man. \u00a0I was listening to the radio and on came the commercial. \u00a0It was a special like no other. \u00a0If I ordered today, I would be able to get the \u201cdeal\u201d \u2026 Unbelievable price \u2026 Unbelievable value. \u00a0I didn\u2019t even think I really needed to buy her flowers this year (I was just going to make time and spend the day with her, silly me), but when I heard the commercial, I was suddenly left without a choice. \u00a0I had to buy them, if I wanted to be the man I, no she, wants me to be. \u00a0So I went online, ordered them and signed, sealed and all but delivered (which is guaranteed to happen by noon today) the deal. \u00a0I took care if it and wouldn\u2019t have to think about it one more little bit.<\/p>\n
All except just about the time\u00a0I was feeling pretty good, I passed the flower shop in my little town of Lowell, MI where a local flower shop was offering their Valentine special. \u00a0Not as slick, not as cheap … but in our small little town way, where we know each other\u2019s name, I realized I just jipped our local Daisy\u2019s Flowers shop buy going with the proflowers.com deal and sold out the local shop my friend owns. \u00a0Additionally by the time I selected the vase, the additional dozen, the chocolates, and the \u201cguaranteed\u201d delivery option from proflowers.com, it actually wasn\u2019t cheaper as I ended up paying $79.95 instead of the $39.95 on the initial sticker price. \u00a0So not only did I end up paying more than if I would have just bought them myself and delivered them, I missed out on the human interaction in the flower shop and in the school office where I would have taken them to give them to my wife in person.<\/p>\n
And if that isn\u2019t all a big enough kicker, as I write this post and realized I am going to have to tell my wife that I spent $80 on her flowers, and from that fact alone, any time we do end up spending together on Valentine\u2019s Day will be fractured with the stress and tension of my stupid financial decision (spending money we don’t have). \u00a0Ultimately this is all because some greed filled, power-wielding capitalists have figured out how to steal roses from the land and people who grow them, cutting out all the little people with their own flower shops trying to make a small honest living with something they are passionate about, creating a nationwide marketing campaign to exploit a bunch of suckers into thinking they need something they don\u2019t even want, driving the price of what gets them to initially sign-up to double the cost, and ultimately in the end creating a whole bunch of \u201ccollateral damage\u201d along the way.<\/p>\n
While obviously a slightly goofy dramatization, Zygmunt Bauman, a Polish sociologist, in his book, \u201cCollateral Damage: Social inequalities in a global age\u201d, writes a more technical account of the onset, decay, ruin and eventual “hope” for society and its battle between the human nature and the human politic. \u00a0As Bauman states:<\/p>\n
I am sure, however, that the explosive compound of growing social inequality and the rising volume of human suffering relegated to the status of \u2018collaterality\u2019 (marginality, externality, disposability, not a legitimate part of the political agenda) has all the markings of being potentially the most disastrous among the many problems humanity may be forced to confront, deal, with and resolve in the current century.1<\/em><\/p>\n In a nutshell, I believe Bauman believes humanity went south when society and its care for the individual became hijacked by the individual and the individual\u2019s care for itself. \u00a0Due to greed and a blatant abuse of power of a few, exploiting the masses of humanity, created for a “social economy”, was put under for a humanity who had to learn to survive in a “market economy”. \u00a0With all kinds of long swirling schuttes and high reaching ladders throughout his book, Bauman\u2019s ultimate hope is in sociology being recognized as a true and valid science with enough authority for people to hear as gospel and in turn lead humanity back to the social creation it was meant to be caring about and for one another.<\/p>\n The greatest issue I have with Bauman\u2019s thinking is that his hope of society correcting itself through the efforts of sociology is impossible. \u00a0It is funny to me that he knows the need for the second part of the great commandment, \u2018love your neighbor as yourself\u2019, but has no concept of the first part of a \u2018love the Lord your God\u2019 being the first and greatest prerequisite. \u00a0Without acknowledging that something is broke within in the human condition and will, that eventually if not regularly will act towards and center-on self and all the self-suffixes, (self-centered, self-reliant, self-preserving, etc \u2026 ) Bauman offers no reasonable hope for a cure to the ultimate corruption of sin, of broken humanity in need of a savior outside of self and humanity, to remedy the greater exploitation of our souls and all creation. \u00a0Bauman thinks:\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n As views memorized and skills acquired are poor and all too often misleading or even treacherous guides to action and as the knowledge available transcends the individual capacity to assimilate it, whereas the assimilated fraction usually falls far short of what is required by an understanding of the situation (the knowledge of how to go on, that is) – the condition of frailty, transience and contingency has become for the duration, and perhaps for very long time to come, the natural human habitat. \u00a0And so it is with the sort of human experience that sociology needs to engage in the continuous dialogue.2<\/em><\/p>\n So while I ponder the “collateral damage” of the exploitation and poverty I am experiencing this Valentine\u2019s Day weekend, at least I can do so knowing I have a Savior who will forgive me, heal my broken relationships, and set all things right in the Kingdom economy I am praying to be a part of in this world and the next.<\/p>\n 1\u00a0Zygmunt Bauman. Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2011. p. 9.<\/p>\n 2\u00a0Zygmunt Bauman. Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2011. p. 171.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Confession: \u00a0I just contributed to the \u201ccollateral damage\u201d of which I am a part. \u00a0I bought my wife Valentine\u2019s Day flowers from proflowers.com. \u00a0I am a horrible man. \u00a0I was listening to the radio and on came the commercial. \u00a0It was a special like no other. \u00a0If I ordered today, I would be able to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[63,605],"class_list":["post-3992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bauman","tag-zygmunt-bauman","cohort-lgp5"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3992"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3993,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3992\/revisions\/3993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}