During the past week we happened to rent both “Blood Diamond” and “Fast Food Nation”. It was hard not to notice that these two movies were a little different from the movies with people dressed in leotards pretending to be bat-men or comedies involving Will Farrell as an incompetent (insert weird profession here). I liked both movies but they both had within them some deep political agendas to educate people about issues we would normally be blissfully unaware of spoon-fed as drama with brand name actors and musical stars. In the case of Blood Diamond the basic message within the action packed drama was that the DeBeers family controls the diamond industry as a cartel and that nice rock that westerners are paying $5-$20K for as a down payment on a wife is the source in a land far away of children being recruited to becoming soldiers and countless victims of machine gun fire in senseless wars. The Fast Food Nation thesis was something similar but in this case more about how we are so divorced from the source of our beef that we don’t appreciate what happens on the killing room floor, who is suffering in substandard conditions to bring the food to us (illegal immigrants), and that our food probably has a lot of cow dung mixed in with it because nobody cares to police it that hard. In this case the meat packing giants replaced the DeBeers family.

So I make a couple of observations from the spoon feeding of this information to me. The first is that I, like most folks of my generation, no longer actively seek out this sort of information. I go to my regular source of information/entertainment, Hollywood Video, and consume whatever they give me. In order to communicate social issues to me you need to package them in a format that I can digest, usually something with a love affair between Jennifer Connelly and Leonardo DiCaprio with lots of explosions and body count. I can also sit through seeing that guy from the Seventy’s Show, Greg Kinnear, and Bruce Willis.

But the other more obvious fact is that there is something that hasn’t quite been worked out in the modern world in terms of balancing the supply chain with old-fashioned ethics. It seems that given the world of corporations and the need for profit established in a capitalist society, connected with the public’s need not to know dirty details about the sources of their consumer products, it is more than likely that the suffering by some will be created inadvertently by the consumer machine. This was unlikely to have been as much of a problem in a world where travel and transportation was more restricted. That is a highly ironic fact given that many people thought that the birth of international travel was a great peace keeping event. So I’m hoping that the next generation is getting fed proper visibility into the repercussions of their lifestyle so that actions of consumers, myself included, can be somehow directed to lead to ethical supply systems. It may be impossible to do but the alternative… that’s what we have now and it isn’t working ideally in some cases.