Dear Cindy Woods,

president

Student Organization for Fair Trade

The Student Organization for Fair Trade’s (SOFT’s) campaign to make OU serve only fair-trade coffee undermines our freedom.

As students of OU, we have the right to purchase coffee that is unfairly traded.

I know it sounds bad that the coffee in my $3 venti latte with honey, extra cream and zero-calorie sugar was grown by a farmer who is paid less than $1 a day; that the farmer can’t afford to send his children to school; that his children are weighed regularly to see if their level of starvation is severe enough to qualify them for international food aid.

But Cindy, just because these foreign children are hungry doesn’t mean I should pay an extra 50 cents for my $3 venti latte with honey, extra cream and zero-calorie sugar.

I’m sure these chronically malnourished children understand.

We should worry about what’s closest to us. We should worry about local workers. This is why many people go to Target instead of Walmart. Target pays its employees better than Walmart does, but neither care how their products were made, simply that they’re made.

That’s why the places that do care – Native Roots, The Earth and Forward Foods – always seem to be struggling.

Walmart doesn’t care about girls working 18-hour days to make their SALE jeans. It would cost them a lot of money to care.

We should follow this example and take a patriotic approach – only worry about Americans. We should forget the Ethiopian, Chinese and Indonesian workers spending 90-hour weeks 52 weeks a year in drudge-work watching their children slowly starving to death. God knows what would happen if they were to get sick.

With this system, when I’m feeling down after some girl rejects me, I have a ready-made pick-me-up. I can go to the store, buy a bunch of cheap consumer items, and feel better about life.

Trust me, it works. It’s good for the soul, and it’s the new American pastime.

After all, buying cheap shit is the key to happiness.

If these people were paid as much as I’m paid for my time –barely over minimum wage – I’d be blowing several hundred dollars to feel better about myself. That really isn’t an economically viable option for me at this point in my life.

However, your organization makes a point. The subsistence poverty the economic system has created is unstable. If there’s a crisis these people can’t protect themselves, and they die.

But then we good, altruistic Americans gain international favor by sending aid. We can give them some of our surplus for which we’ve worked so hard.

It makes us look like their benefactors, not their masters or their slave-drivers.

Who are you to say that because people in another country people aren’t paid enough I should pay more for my coffee?

I like things the way they are with our overly affluent way of life, and I have the right to support it with my unfairly traded venti latte with honey, extra cream and zero-calorie sugar.

We see self-righteous, do-gooders like you imposing “common” values on everyone else far too often. Just look at:

1. The pro-lifers, pushing their values on everyone else. They want to deny me my right to not have a baby when I screw up, so to speak.

2. The homophobes who tell us who can and can’t get married while breaking their wedding vows right and left.

3. The pansy who wants to take my guns away when killing each other is a way of life here in America.

4. The prudes who say I can’t bone that pretty hooker; all right, bad example.

5. The people who say I can’t shoot that guy who slept with my girl; no one should argue with this one, it’s a matter of my honor, my manhood.

These intransigent bigots are all saying I can’t do something I want to. And they all have the same reasoning; it’s for the greater good.

Why is it that the greater good never seems to include me, the affluent upper-class white male American who’s just trying to get by?

I’m sick of this rich man’s burden challenging my place in the world and not other people’s.

We need to only worry about ourselves. If we all work for our own interests, and forget the rest, we’ll prosper.

Then the lazy and weak will finally go the way of the dodo.

A simple study of economic history will tell you that.

Seriously Cindy, don’t tell me what I can and cannot drink. Don’t tell me what I can and cannot buy. And don’t guilt-trip me when I don’t buy your shtick.

My freedom is too sacred to be violated for poor foreigners who didn’t have the sense to be born in America.

Bottom line, buy unfairly traded coffee, it’s better for business. It’s better for me.

Sincerely,

Max Avery

Another member of the great silent majority that appreciates the true meaning of freedom.