Who's Minding the Store ?

by Goldwin (Goldie) J. Emerson

A little over fifty years ago it was a common practice in rural communities to have a general store which served the needs of those who lived nearby. Typically the store would be owned and operated by a husband and wife who knew everyone and who were known by everyone in the community.

The general store stocked the basic goods which farmers themselves were not able to produce from their own land. Thus, there would be very little demand for products such as eggs, fruit, fresh milk and apples or home baked cookies or fresh bread such as we would find today in our local Loblaws or A&P stores.

The general store was much more than a place to buy things. It was a place to meet others, to share news and gossip or to pick up your mail from the small post office housed in a back corner of the store. It was a place to visit with your neighbours, and to discuss the weather, the price of cattle and the progress of the current crop of oats or barley. It was also a place to display posters announcing an auction sale, or a special event at a nearby church or school. In another corner of the store there might even be a barber's chair sitting close to some coils of fencing wire or some cans of coal oil or some heavy machinery bolts and a few kegs of nails.

Most of the produce would be neatly stored on shelves located behind a wooden counter that appeared at first to separate the storekeeper from the customer. However, these stores were not of the modern self-serve variety and so the counter between customer and storekeeper actually served to have the opposite affect. In order to buy anything the customer needed and received the full personal attention of the storekeeper.

The storekeepers who tended the store or , if you will, "minded" the store did much more than simply take money from the customer. The successful job of minding the store meant that the storekeeper needed to have in mind , or to anticipate ahead of time, what the true needs of the customer would be. Minding the store meant that he and she needed to know their customers well. In spring time it was important to have an adequate supply of fencing wire and fencing staples ready so that farmers could mend the winter damage to their fences. Prior to September, the prudent storekeeper would stock up on some pencils, a few rulers and scribblers and some children's shoes since the summer season of going in bare feet was drawing to a close. Perhaps a few bolts of cloth suitable for making a child's blouse or a skirt would be in order. Later as colder weather approached it might be wise to have a few extra pairs of long underwear ready for sale.

In other words, the successful "minder" of the store needed to look ahead, to understand people's life styles, to be friendly to all, to be highly organized, and to anticipate well in advance the steps required to fulfill the community's needs. He or she could not afford to be too casual if the business of store keeping was to flourish from the meagre income of the farmers.

Now I would invite you to think of a bigger store which exists in the present generation. This bigger store is really huge. It is called the "global" store. Instead of serving a small rural community, the global store serves everyone on this globe. The global store has vast quantities of goods within it. It contains a lot of fresh water, though not as much as it had fifty years ago. It contains some quantities of clean air, though in Southwestern Ontario not as much as in the rest of our country. The global store still has lots of natural resources, especially in Canada, though not as many. as it had a few decades ago. The global store now has lots of customers . In fact there are about six billion customers and the number is increasing rapidly each day. All of them come to shop every day at the global store because there is only one such store. Although it is the only store that we have it is still quite convenient. It serves so many people that we don’t get to know everybody else who takes their supplies from it. But some argue that, maybe that's good because we get what we want and we don’t need to talk to other people or be concerned about their particular problems. We can just grab what we are looking for and we don’t need to think too much about the needs of others. Actually, we have more of some things than we used to have. Although we have less ozone to protect us from ultra-violet rays we do have many more holes in the layer than we used to have fifty years ago. We also have more global warming. This addition provides us with more erratic weather patterns including more floods and increased droughts and desertification in more countries than previously. One person out of every seven in the world is starving today. We still have quite a few international agreements to help six billion people get along with each other but now we have much more unilateral action than we used to. In fact some of the very most powerful countries in the whole world are working unilaterally to keep the rest the world free from evil. There are so many examples of such unilateral actions that fifty years ago we could not even have thought of so many. They include the rejection of land mine treaties, the rejection of the World Court decisions, the replacement of fair trade by what is euphemistically called free trade, pre-emptive military strikes on countries which have smaller populations than that of Canada, and refusal to agree not to use atomic weapons as first strike weapons. These unilateral actions also includes rejection of the Kyoto agreement and rejection of formerly agreed upon treaties to provide adequate health care systems for people in third world counties and for the alleviation of child poverty and the cancellation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. Unilateral attempts to save the globe from evil also leaves it up to the most powerful countries to be free to decide whether or not to comply with United Nations decisions or to provide adequate financial support for its continued operation.

So the question arises as to who is minding the global store. When I was much younger I was taught to believe that God was in charge. I was told that while there may be some ups and downs in life that things would never be allowed to become completely catastrophic. I was told that with the proper hope and religious faith that good would always prevail over evil in the long run. Now as a Humanist I have come to believe that God will neither condemn nor save us. It is we, and not God, who are responsible for the global store. In matters of such importance, I now believe that when we ask for help God will maintain his customary silence. I believe that the problems in our world, whether poverty, starvation, pollution, war, over- population, lack of health care, or of illiteracy, are human made problems and in the end will need to be solved by human made solutions.

Perhaps, as a humanist, my listeners might expect that I would be inclined to pick human leaders to solve global problems and this is partly correct. There are human heroes whom I look up to but generally speaking, with a few exceptions, they are not political leaders. For example, President Bush recently censored a government report by the Environmental Protection Agency that analyzed global warming. The Bush White House counter report eliminated any suggestions that human activities, notably industrial and vehicle emissions, were at least partly responsible for climate change. It removed references to a 1999 study that showed how sharply temperatures had risen in the past decade. The White House substituted a controversial later study that was financed by the oil industry and in it disputes the original evidence of the Environmental Protection Agency.

In Ontario, the government headed up by Ernie Eves has recently been under criticism for their policy of privatizing energy and the government has now decided to allow nuclear power plants the same tax concessions as those given to “clean” producers of electricity such as solar or wind or water power. This decision flies in the face of the fact that no reputable environmentalists consider nuclear power as a clean source of energy which can be manufactured without pollutants. In fact, nuclear waste may turn out to be the worst of all environmental pollutants because of its long lasting and unpredictable effects.

On balance, I think that most politicians work hard and they probably spend many more hours at political tasks than most of us give them credit for. I admire those who like Nelson Mandella or Mahatma Ghandi are either attracted to, or driven to politics by high principles and are motivated by their idealism throughout their careers. But, on the whole, such people are more scarce than plentiful and I think we can not count on them to be able to mind our global store.

Can we turn then to our religious leaders to mind the global store? Again, the contributions from religious leaders has been rather spotty and uncertain. The Pope speaks often of peace but the historical record of religious wars and also the present-day record would suggest that many religions still see war, and especially a holy war, as a preferred option. In matters of birth control, abortion, and humane respect for the wishes of the terminally ill, pronouncements from traditional religions have often not been helpful

Some have suggested that the “laissez faire “ approach of unbridled capitalism will, in the end, work out for the best. They argue that we should let corporations be self-regulating. Let the large industries decide what is the appropriate amount of pollutants to release into the environment and let them decide which resources to take from the global store. In turn, these industries will reward the store by providing employment for many people. When business flourishes they argue that every customer within the globe will benefit. Let the big industries such as General Electric, General Motors, Bombardier and producers of private electricity compete with each other and the prices of the goods will reach such a low level that they will be within the purchasing power of us all. However, I am inclined to think that it is the past few decades of unbridled capitalism that has got us to the present situation where no one is fully committed to minding the global store.

So we seem to be left then with the problem of who’s minding the store. If we could find enough good people with enough good will and the right principles there is a chance that fairly ordinary people might leave the global store in at least as good a condition as they found it. But what kind of principles and what kind of people would be needed in order to make this happen.?

First, they should be people who recognize the essential worth and dignity of every one else on the globe.

Second, they would need to have a desire for justice, for equality, and above all for a sense of compassion in their relations with others.

Third, they should encourage and accept and support each other.

Fourth, they should continue to freely and responsibly look for meaning and truth in their own lives.

Fifth, ideally, they would have a respect for their fellow humans and allow them to decide what they believe in good conscience to be true and then they should allow others to follow their consciences keeping in mind the rights of others and the value of the democratic methods of decision making in doing so.

Six, they would need to think about the idea of a global community which embraced principles of peace and freedom and justice for everyone.

Seven, they should consider how everything that exists on the globe has a relationship to every other part in an interdependent unity or world wide web of existence.

Do these seven principles sound familiar to you? If they do, I am optimistic that there is still hope for a healthy global store.