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Are the ingredients in the products my family and I use safe?

What kind of conditions were the products I use produced under?

Were the growers or workers paid a fair price or wage?

How can I promote and protect democracy and human rights?

What can I do to promote equality?

How can I make a difference?

These are some of the relevant questions that people are asking today. I know, because I have asked myself the same questions. With increasing globalization, both consumers and producers are becoming alienated from the production process. Local production in the industrialized world is decreasing and global branding is increasing. In today’s modern world of outsourcing, what is produced by whom, with what ingredients and under what conditions is becoming increasingly difficult to ascertain.

Globalization has yet to fulfill promises of democratic change and a reduction of human rights violations around the world that pundits and politicians have insisted were inevitable. Political rhetoric and the interests of individual countries continue to thwart a consistent protection of human rights internationally. Terms like “human rights”, “democracy” and “self-determination” have become subordinated foreign policy interests, reflecting the individualistic role that nation states play. The foreign policy interests of a country or a coalition of countries does not provide a solid foundation for human rights protection around the world. There are people, some of them so called “movers and shakers”, that would like to base rights on the shifting sands of political pragmatism or expediency. Still others, would like to bury at least some rights in legalese. The legitimacy of a democratic society is determined by the extent to which it includes minority groups at home and even handedly promotes civil and human rights both at home and abroad, not by spouting platitudes.

Increasing concern for the environment and worry about climate change has prompted expressions of alarm from people all over the world. The interests of individual countries continue to thwart not only a consistent protection of human rights internationally; environmental protection and the promotion of environmental viability have been hard hit as well. A United Nations Climate Change Convention and Conference of Parties (COP) is taking place in Copenhagen from the 30th. of November to the 11th. of December 2009, but again, there will only be some substantive results if countries are willing to put aside narrow economic and political interests for the purpose of creating an effective environmental policy that has a global reach.

Poverty, war, crime, pollution, ignorance, discrimination, imperialism, injustice, arrogance; there are a lot of problems out there in the world. This website is about me taking off my personal set of blinders, commenting on what I see, and trying to make a difference through humanitarian action.