EV3, Starbucks, and Consumerism

There’s been a fair amount of consternation in the Waterloo parts recently over the plans for the new Environment building (EV3) to contain a Starbucks. This decision was reportedly made by the university honchos and/or food services management, and not by the Faculty of Environment – but the idea of a Starbucks in an Environment building has been controversial because of a lack of consultation with the student body, the harm it will likely cause to the student-run coffee shop in EV1, and the faculty’s commitment to ideals such as Fair Trade.

Recently, the Environment Student Society sent out a survey asking for students’ opinions on the matter, which they’ll use in their discussions with the Faculty and with Starbucks reps. My response took a different tack from the others listed above, though an equally important tack, if not more so.

(For the curious, I think I was channelling my inner James Howard Kunstler when I wrote this, with perhaps a dash of Jack Cafferty thrown in.)

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1. What faculty are you in at the University of Waterloo? Environment
   
   
2. How do you feel about having a Starbucks franchise in EV3? I don’t support it
   
   
3. Please state specific factors that led to your decision in question #2.
   
   The way I see it, Starbucks is a powerful symbol of the excesses of our consumer culture. Whereas, say, Tim Hortons (or Country Style, etc.) takes pride in its everyman image, Starbucks seems to take pride in having a hip, stylish image -- turning a cup of coffee into a status symbol. Of course, both images are just marketing ploys, which makes the suggestion of a cooler-than-thou cup of coffee all the more ludicrous. With their relentlessly trendy image, their irresponsibly high pricing that gives the illusion of a "boutique" product, and their sheer ubiquitousness, Starbucks contributes to Western society's faux ideals of owning the smartphone, camera, and HDTV du jour; living in a McMansion with a three-car garage; driving the coolest cars; and wearing the latest fashions.
   
   When was the last time you heard of a movie star drinking Country Style or Dunkin' Donuts? I'm not saying that all movie stars drink Starbucks, but this is more easily imaginable since it's the image Starbucks creates, the delusion they want the public to buy into and adopt for themselves. If you're a middle-class Canadian envying a piece of the high-class lifestyle, Starbucks is right there on your doorstep; it's more accessible than Gucci. This sort of marketing and media-induced peer pressure plays a huge role in turning citizens into consumers, never content with what they have and seeking more than they *need* -- which, in turn, causes resource exhaustion; urban sprawl; overworked and overstressed families; the inequitable distribution of resources; an ever-growing hunger for energy, whatever the source; and all sorts of other stuff that the Faculty of Environment seeks to reduce. It seems ironic, therefore, that the faculty would willingly share its space with an organization that contributes to these very problems.
   
   
4. If you don’t support the Starbucks franchise in EV3, what food outlet would you suggest instead?
   
   That's the thing; I'm not sure I could recommend any particular brand, for the reasons stated above. I'd be most likely to recommend Tim Hortons, but there are enough of those on campus already. This being the case, I'd like to see some sort of independent coffee shop in EV3 -- not one of those hipster-calibre indie coffee shops, but one that is what it is, doesn't try to be anything but wholesome and genuine, and serves environmentally and socially sustainable products on principle and not because the faculty is forcing it to. In particular, I think it would be great if the ESS Coffee Shop could expand into this space, giving the Faculty a proper C&D. It's got a pretty good menu already, but its current ordering area is cramped to the point of being uninviting. Nonetheless, if an established brand sets up shop in EV3, the ESS Coffee Shop will likely need more than a renovation in order to stay competitive.

A brief history of the past few months, Part I

This is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now. When I learned about my brain tumour, a friend from church suggested that I write about my experiences. That didn’t happen, but I still think it’s worth chronicling, if only to have a record of it for myself.

Since I wasn’t really keeping track of this stuff as it happened, what follows is, as Margaret Atwood’s heroine Offred would say, a “reconstruction”. I’ll try not to recount every detail of every doctor’s appointment I’ve had, but even so, my condensed version will require a lot of text, so I’ll spare you the eye strain and do this in chunks. Think of it as episodes in a serial medical drama.

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PROLOGUE:

• 2007:
  • I’m talking with friends in the TDCH Commons at lunch, and I realize that it’s hard for me to hear them. I cup my right ear in their direction, and it seems to help.
  • I realize that I’m having a hard time hearing the people who sit to my left on the schoolbus.
  • It’s the TDCH talent show, and I’m working as a stagehand, helping the acts with their microphones as they go on and off the stage. The people working at the sound booth gave me a headset so I could hear their instructions. Except that it was one of those headsets that only has one ear, and it was made for the left ear. By this time, I had a slight suspicion that my left ear was a bit weaker than my right ear ("Just like being left-eye- or right-eye-dominant," I told myself at the time). And sure enough, I could barely understand their instructions, leading to some embarrassing misunderstandings (really embarrassing given that one of the guys on sound – a friend of one of the teachers – was a Juno-nominated producer).
• 2008:
  • I noticed that I was having problems swallowing dry foods like bagels. The stuff seemed to get stuck in the upper part of my throat until I washed it down with water. I had a barium swallow at a nearby hospital, but the images didn’t show anything suspicious.
  • One day, I talked with my grandmother on the phone, and, trying to multitask, I held the phone against my left ear. I could barely make out the words she was saying. I spent the rest of the afternoon lying on the couch – I suppose I was stressed out by it at the time.
• 2009:
  • On the way to a band practice with Dad one morning, I mentioned how I definitely thought my hearing was getting worse; my estimate was that I had lost 15-20% of the hearing in my left ear, and gained a strange hiss in its place. I had a hearing test at the doctor’s office – the most basic hearing test you can imagine. It showed no hearing loss.
  • I was still having problems swallowing, so I was referred to an ENT (ear/nose/throat) specialist in Sarnia. While I was there, I mentioned about my hearing loss, and I had a more sophisticated hearing test there. My estimate of 15-20% turned out to be pretty accurate – but the hearing loss was mainly in the lowest and highest frequencies. Based on this characteristic and the hissing, the ENT specialist suspected that my auditory nerve was damaged, and he sent me for a CT scan at the local hospital.
  • The CT scan didn’t show anything suspicious. So, since it was nerve damage and not eardrum damage, it was the sort of thing no hearing aid could fix – make the sound as loud as you want, and it still won't make it to the brain. I was just going to have to live with the nerve damage and hope it didn’t get worse. I imagined myself walking from class to class at Waterloo that fall, messenger bag slung over my shoulders, trying to be a hip university student, and still having this annoying hiss in my ear.
  • During the early part of the summer, I went for acupuncture to try and fix my hearing. Didn’t work.
  • Oddly enough, once I stopped the acupuncture, my hearing got worse. To the point where I told my classmates at Waterloo that I was basically deaf in my left ear, so if you’re going to walk beside me, walk on my right side if you want me to hear you.
  • My hearing loss didn’t go unmentioned when I would phone my parents from Waterloo. Shortly before Christmas, Mom called the ENT specialist to get me in for another hearing test while I would be home for Christmas. Being the only ENT clinic in Sarnia, they were booked solid, but they said they could squeeze me in when I would be at home for Reading Week.

NEXT TIME…“SWEET! I had forgotten about that!”

"The Right Man For the Job": A Short Story

In Grade 11 English class, we were shown this photo, without being told who the subject of the photo was. We had to imagine who he might have been, and write about him, relating his story to our interests in some way. This is who I made him.

It's certainly the best piece of fiction I've ever written, though of course that's not saying much since I tend to stick to non-fiction. Here it is, with a couple minor word changes:

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THE RIGHT MAN FOR THE JOB
By Jonathan Van Dusen

EDINBURGH, 1894.

Click, tap, clack, thwump. Click, tap, clack, thwump. Click, tap, clack, thwump.

It was a sound that grew monotonous, but Reynolds knew that the process took patience. He watched the gears turn, the steel output rods dancing up and down to the mechanical beat, and the stack of punch cards that the analytical engine swallowed one by one. He crinkled his nose as he watched the translucent puffs of steam fly out the window into the Victorian winter.

It had been two weeks since his consultation with the local Science Council. His analytical engine was the sort of phenomenon they had only heard about in their yearly conferences in London, when Charles Babbage had introduced his machine, and Ada Lovelace her visions for this invention. But Babbage had been dead for decades now, and his visions for these mechanical mathematical machines had never been truly realized.

This is where Ronald Reynolds came in. He had spent thirty years of his life teaching logic and mathematics, which led to an interest in these analytical engines. His machine was but his hobby, something that he worked on simultaneously with the garden behind his city house. He saw logic as another aspect of the beauty he experienced in this garden, and it was this rustic nature that him from shaving a beard that was turning increasingly grey, and kept him in the sort of unpretentious clothes one would not expect from someone in the Edinburgh city centre.

The Council had said they would send a carriage to transport him to their weekly lunchtime meeting. Noticing on his pocket watch that the time was growing nearer for his departure, Reynolds placed a piece of plywood in the machine’s gears to lock them, and left the house. The carriage arrived at exactly the specified time, and took him to the building the Council had been renting. He was escorted upstairs to their spacious boardroom, where twelve men, seated at a long oak table, were regarding him with a mix of curiosity and excitement.

“Good day, Mr. Reynolds,” came the greeting from a smiling, portly man at the head of the table. It was Higgins, their leader, who had taken an interest in Reynolds' work due to an acquaintance with Babbage himself. He motioned for Reynolds to sit across from him, at the other end.

“We have reviewed your application for a grant. We recognise the usefulness of your discoveries, the potential uses by the military. To this end” – Reynolds shifted nervously in his chair as Higgins began to smile – “we are prepared to invest £5000 in this project.”

Reynolds grinned. “My deepest thanks, gentlemen! I am convinced that this will be of benefit to us all.”

“As are we,” nodded Higgins, who then took a sip of his tea. “However, our grant comes with a condition. Mr. Burton?” He pointed to another seated man.

The young man named Burton stood and nodded towards Reynolds, smiling.

Higgins continued. “Mr. Burton’s current field of study is that of electricity. We assume you are familiar with, for instance, the current studies of Edison and Bell?”

Reynolds gave a small sigh and nodded. He was familiar with the field and found it intriguing, but he had always wondered if such applications would ever truly enter the mainstream. After all, no households owned telegraphs, did they?

“Our friend Mr. Burton is experimenting with such things, and is spending a particular amount of time on the concept for an electric version of your math machine.”

Reynolds raised his eyebrows as Burton, still standing, cleared his throat.

“My training lies in electricity, Mr. Reynolds, and yours in mathematics. We have seen many advances in electricity lately, and we have come to the decision that much of the coming century will involve further advances, possibly to the demise of the mechanical trades within the next few decades. But with electricity, the possibilities are endless. Imagine your logic, contained inside a box the size of a loaf of bread!”

Higgins regained control. “As such, we will give you the grant on the condition that you use your logic skills and experience to aid Mr. Burton with his research; a fusion of sorts between the two areas of study.”

Reynolds leaned back in the padded chair and took a slow drink of tea. It was an avenue he had never considered and didn’t know how to respond to. He would have been perfectly content, oh yes, to use a grant on his beloved apparatus, and then present it to interested clients. He frowned slightly, all eyes on him, as he wondered if it was possible to teach an old scholar new tricks.

He sat up slowly. “It if is possible, gentlemen, would you grant me some more time to consider this proposal?”

Higgins took a look around the table, his face showing both disappointment and irritation. “Very well. You have until our meeting next week to reach a decision.”

Reynolds stood up, put on his coat, and said thank-you. He used the carriage ride home as a chance to gather his thoughts. As they approached the house, however, he could identify the bitter smells of a steam engine, but a smell far stronger than he was accustomed to. Minutes passed, and he noticed the wafts of not just steam, but smoke rising from a corner of his house.

He realised his mistake at once: prior to leaving, he had locked the machine’s gears in place, but had never turned off the steam engine. The machine had overheated, and he entered the workshop to find a warped rack of steel, with gears fused together, and ashes for punch cards.

The fabled analytical machine, the object of Reynolds’ devotion, was no longer.

But its successor was needed, and as Ronald Reynolds sorted through his surviving notes on the fundamentals of logic, he realized that he was still the man for the job.

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The Right Man For the Job by Jonathan Van Dusen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

Consumerism Conscience

This is a speech I wrote and presented as a Grade 12 English assignment, and the topic is something about which I am quite passionate. (If you’ve really been paying attention, you might recognize Sterling’s quote from my “Favorite Quotes” on Facebook.) Bear in mind that it was written as a speech – by which I mean that I would have written it differently were it an essay, commentary, or blog post.

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The man worked at a Wal-Mart on Long Island. His death occurred on Friday, November 28^th, 2008, a day when most of the nation was looking the other way. You see, the day was 2008’s “Black Friday”, the first day of the December shopping season. So how did the worker die? He didn’t die in a car accident in the New York traffic. He was not mugged on the street on his way to work. On the contrary, he died at work around 6:00 A.M., after being trampled by a crowd of avid shoppers.

With this in mind, I must say that I am not here today to tell you to live like cavemen. I am not here today to claim that Wal-Mart is evil. However, I am here today to give you a chance to reflect on a societal habit that our age group often overlooks. Because the more I look at our society, the more I grow convinced that our biggest threat is one for which we are all responsible: our consumer culture.

In truth, consumerism has dominated humanity for most of its civilized existence. A civilization’s economy helped it expand, trade led to cultures and empires discovering each other, and trade routes eventually led to the global village we have today. But the irony is that this global village is now being damaged by the consumerism that helped create it, and the effects are worse than ever.

We see this when basic commodities are made in foreign countries, made by the hands of women and children paid little for their efforts. This is not just. And we see this when, in the middle of a cold Canadian winter, supermarket produce departments are filled with foods that have been shipped from warm tropical climates half a world away, just to get to our dinner table. This is not sustainable.

We also see this when our global village is linked by a media that serves only to advertise. We complain about advertisements when they interrupt television programs or websites, but do we ever try to reject the mentality that gives us these ads? Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, we are being told to buy items we don’t really need. We are being told that buying these items will increase our self-worth and outward image. We are being told all this through whatever forms of media we choose, but unlike in previous generations, our modern media is so deep and so far-reaching that it we often turn it into our own personal universe, a cocoon made from the messages we like best.

I would like to close by going back to the Black Friday movement. A group called Adbusters has created a counter-movement, called “Buy Nothing Day”. This day intentionally falls on Black Friday, every year. A peer of mine commented, upon hearing of the idea, that buying nothing that day would be a “stupid” idea, because of the day’s lower prices. But ultimately, neither Black Friday nor Buy Nothing Day is about prices. If we are to try and weaken the pull and temptation of consumerism, what better time is there to do it than on consumerism’s strongest and most tempting day? So I encourage you to not only participate in Buy Nothing Day this coming year, but also to be conscious for the rest of the year of the things you buy, want and need. Science fiction author Bruce Sterling recently said it best:

It’s not bad to own fine things that you like. What you need are things that you GENUINELY [sic] like. Things that you cherish, that enhance your existence in the world. The rest is dross.

Dross. Anything that is trivial, that has no worth.

Dross. Waste, impurities, scum.

What in your life enhances your existence? And what in your life is merely dross? My challenge to you is to reflect on this. But don’t just stop there: do what you can to remove this dross from your life.

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Bibliography (Works Cited)

“dross.” Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2009. Merriam-Webster Online. 12 February 2009 <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dross>.

“dross.” Wiktionary. 26 Oct. 2008. Wikimedia Foundation. 12 Feb. 2009 <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dross>.

Long, Colleen. “Wal-Mart worker dies in Black Friday trampling.” Sympatico/MSN Finance. 28 Nov. 2008. Associated Press. 12 Feb. 2009 <http://finance.sympatico.msn.ca/investing/insight/article.aspx?cp-documentid=14539064>.

Sterling, Bruce. “The Last Viridian Note.” Viridian. 19 Nov. 2008. 12 Feb. 2009 <http://www.viridiandesign.org/notes/451-500/the_last_viridian_note.html>.

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Developing a Conscience for Canada's Consumerism Culture by Jonathan Van Dusen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

Stay tuned! (aka "My Blog: Seven Months Later")

So my last blog post was in January, and this fact isn't as hard to believe as you might think. A second semester that was absolutely killer in terms of homework (picture this: American History + ISU, Physics, English, and Law), a more-than-melancholy trip to Pennsylvania immediately after my Law exam, and a busy couple weeks here in Brights Grove [sic], meant that this blog shrank to far less than what I had imagined for it.

Next week, though, I'll be heading back to Pennsylvania for what should be a slightly more normal visit. During this time, I hope to not only finish off some of my summer goals, but to write a series of long-overdue blog posts, on topics including my recent experiences and mindset, the presidential race, Windows Vista, ABBA/Chess/MAMMA MIA!, the New Facebook, and beyond.

So don't touch that dial! Before you know it, this pathetic little blog that no one reads will turn into a slightly less pathetic blog that a few more people read.

-JVD