Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Boycott yourself

There have been calls by certain quarters to boycott American and Israeli products in protest of their duplicity and complicity in perpetrating the crisis in Gaza. But I'm wondering how to boycott. Should we throw out our Dell and HP laptops? Rip out our Intel chips? Uninstall Microsoft Windows? Throw away Sunkist oranges? Stop using Pantene shampoo? Resist Pringles potato chips? Lose the iPod? Cut up our Citibank credit cards? Resign from FedEx? Just don't buy Nike? Sell off our Chevrolets? Not fly United? Not love McDonald's? Dump Motorola phones? Stop drinking Coke? Don't watch CNN? Avoid Hollywood movies? Flush away Starbucks? Withdraw from Facebook?

An iPhone is designed in America, made in China, most probably using Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese components.

In this globalized world, I wonder who is boycotting who.

6 comments:

Paul Long said...

Nice to see you back blogging.... in Malaysia, they will never boycott anything as UMNO probably has a share of the profits ... so its just hot air again

ee said...

So it's (politically) interesting (or not so) to see one of the big instigators on the boycott is an ex-UMNO PM who gains most with chaos

The Shrimp said...

yeah, we can't export or sell to them too! :)

HL said...

Paul: Hot air politics again? Selective justice? Aren't we hypocrites?

ee: We gotta do something about the perpetual Palestinian crisis, but a simplistic boycott won't work.

Shrimp: Good point. We conveniently forget that the US is our biggest trading partner...

ee said...

HL, do something about the Palestinian war? Then what about Robert Mugabe? What are we planning to do about that? What about Darfur? What have we been doing about that? What about Congo? What about Myanmar? What about India? What about Nepal? What about Afghanistan?

What can we do for Palestine?

I think we're all being sucked into this selective outrage. I've heard of Christians praying for the war in Gaza to stop. Is this God's will? Or this is one of those moments when Jesus says "Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men."

Why do we pray for God to stop the war and pray so little for God to have His will done, and us to be willing to be part of His plan, even if we don't understand the whys?

I wonder the dangers ahead of us when we get too involved with humanitarian work, and mistake it for God's work.

Anonymous said...

I wonder the dangers ahead of us when we get apathetic, and mistake it for being prayerful.

I would find it strange indeed if Christians were to kneel and pray each day and do nothing else, while others form a human chain in the heart of Gaza in protest of violence against citizens of both sides.

We will never have the right to rebuild a nation or society if we never stood by them in solidarity in times of crisis, Bonhoeffer said, something we ought to think about again and again.

Silence never helps the victim, only the aggressor. Let us not by paralysed by the Mugabes and Kim Jong Ils in this world, from doing whatever we can to comfort those in pain and denounce the evil and wrongdoings of governments against their ppl.

After all, love is as much a verb as it is verbally expressed, if u know what i mean.