A Decent Cup of Coffee
Rev. Tony Lorenzen
Pathways Unitarian Universalist Church
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Dave Marsh reports in his biography of Bruce Springsteen that in the very early days of his career the Boss used to invite the musically challenged among his friends to play a game of Monopoly on the stage while the band rocked the clubs and small halls of the Jersey shore. When asked if they were in the group, these friends could honestly say, “Yeah, I’m in the band. I play Monopoly.”
Charles B. Darrow of Germantown, Pennsylvania created Monopoly in 1934. You might call him the Stradivarius of board game makers. Darrow’s games were hand made and 5,000 were sold in a Philadelphia department store. The instrument played by Springsteen’s friends is now mass-produced to the tune of 200 million in 103 countries in 37 different languages. [1]
Hand made or mass-produced, in whatever language, the game is always played with the same goal – bankrupt your opponents. The process of learning how to play anything is always made easier by taking a few lessons. The Hasbro.com website offers a beginner’s course in playing Monopoly, including the following strategy tips:
“Each player starts with $1500 (in Monopoly money).
On an average circuit of the game board, prior to houses appearing, a player will make about $170. This takes into account passing GO, earning rewards, paying penalties and taxes, and the effect of rents.
There are 16 Chance Cards in the game of MONOPOLY:
* Ten of these cards move you elsewhere.
A Chance card will, most likely, send you to another space
*There are 16 Community Chest Cards in the game of MONOPOLY:
* Nine of these cards give you money.
A Community Chest Card will, most likely, give you a reward.
Building advances your ability to bankrupt your opponents. Many MONOPOLY players build all they can afford. However, this strategy results in losses when houses must be torn down to pay rents or other penalties often.
If you have only low-rent color groups, quickly build three or four houses per MONOPOLY property to restrict the availability of houses to owners of high-rent color groups.
Never move up to a hotel anywhere if the return of houses to the bank would enable an opponent to develop an expensive color group.[2]
Although a thoroughly familiar board game to most of us, Monopoly holds many lessons for those willing to play, practice and improvise. You can learn a lot about the world from Monopoly. You can learn a lot about how the world is and about how the world isn’t.
Most people can imagine our world being like a game of Monopoly. Everyone starts off at the “Go” space with the same amount of money, a playing piece of a different shape, but the same color, and an equal chance through luck and strategy to be successful and make the most money, accumulate the most property and bankrupt the other players and win the game.
Imagine playing Monopoly where all the players do not start the game in the same situation. Let’s say player one begins the game with $6,000 or four times the normal amount of starting money and at the beginning of the game already owns the 8 most expensive properties on the board- these being Boardwalk and Park Place, along with the monopolies on the green and yellow properties with hotels on each, maximizing their rents. Player one also begins the game as the owner of all the railroads and utility properties and both “Get Out of Jail Free Cards.” Player one starts the game on the Boardwalk, guaranteed to pass “Go” on his or her first turn and collect $200 more.
Player two begins this game with $3000 or twice the normal starting money and owns at the outset monopolies of the red and orange properties with two houses on each. Player two begins the game on Indiana Ave., one of the red properties.
Player three begins the game with $1500 and as the owner of the light blue properties, starting the game on Connecticut Ave.
Player four begins the game on Go with no money and no property.
In a normal game of Monopoly it’s almost impossible to predict who will win ahead of time. In the game I just described, it’s very easy to tell who is going to win and who is going lose.
Many people like to believe that our world is like the normal game of Monopoly, where everyone starts off equal and has an equal chance to succeed based on how well they play and a bit of luck. If you’re willing to play by the rules, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, and keep your nose to the grindstone, you will succeed. Failure is for lazy, stupid, ignorant, inferior people.
But, you can’t pull yourself up by your own bootstraps if you don’t have boots, or hands. The reality is our world resembles the rigged game of Monopoly. Where and when you are born into this world has a great effect on your ability to succeed. Is it possible for player four to win the Monopoly game I described? Yes, but highly unlikely. Is it possible for player one to lose? Yes, but highly unlikely.
There are those who will say that people who struggle or people who don’t have much in this world don’t work hard, or are lazy. You know the stereotyping. How hard will player four work in our game, how well will player four play at Monopoly and still be unable to win? The reality is that it is possible to work very hard in this world, be very intelligent, very industrious and still face near impossible odds due an unjust economic and social order.
We don’t often think of ourselves as living in perverse luxury because we are not Tony Romo or Oprah Winfrey or Donald Trump, but compared to the rest of the world, the way you and I live is beyond the necessities, beyond extravagant.
One of the easiest ways to frame it is scale down the world to a small village.
This framing comes from Donella H. Meadows at Dartmouth College in her state of the village report. Her report deals with the earth as a village of 1000 people, but I think scaling down to a village of 100 is even easier to grasp and even more powerful. If the world were a village of 100 people:[3]
59 would be Asian
14 would be American (North, Central and South)
14 would be African
12 would be European
1 would be from the South Pacific
52 would be women, 48 would be men
30 would be children, 70 would be adults.
70 would be people of color, 30 would be “white”
90 would be heterosexual, 10 would be homosexual
33 would be Christians
21 would be Moslems
15 would be Hindus
6 would be Buddhists
5 would be Animists
6 would believe in other religions
14 would be non religious or atheist.
6 people would own 59% of everything (all 6 from the United States)
74 people would own 39%, and 20 people would share the remaining 2%.
20 people consume 80% of the energy and resources in the village
And of those 20, 5 of them use about 50%, and those 5 are from the United States. 80 people share the remaining 20%.
20 have no clean, safe water to drink.
44 have no access to sanitation
15 adults are illiterate.
7 have computers.
1 has a college education.
The question must be asked, “Who am I in this village?” The honest answer is I am the one with a college education. I am one of the 7 with a computer. I am one of the richest 6 and one of the 5 who consumes half of everything. So with everything I’ve got and my ability to play this real life Monopoly game, I’ve got ask the next most important question: Where can I get a decent cup of coffee? The answer, it turns out, is this morning, I can get a decent cup of coffee right here at Pathways Unitarian Universalist Church. This morning we have replaced your usual coffee (does this resemble a well know television spot) with organic Fair Trade Coffee and we will literally be saving our village, one cup at a time.
When I ask, “Where can I get a decent cup of coffee?” I don’t mean a really good frothy cappuccino or the biggest biggee super-size for the lowest price. I mean decent as in honest, just and upstanding. Some people think that what coffee you drink isn’t a big moral dilemma, but I think it is. And Monopoly-omics and the state of our village make it plain why. Your choice to serve Fair Trade coffee is an act of sanity and balance in an otherwise unjust village.
Every human choice, decision and act is moral because each one of them makes us who we are. Every choice, every act makes us a certain type of person. When we practice justice, we become more just. Morality is not just about large issues such as war and peace, murder and theft, rape and abuse. Morality is in the everyday – not parking in the handicapped space, choosing to be kind instead of surly to strangers, and even what clothes you wear and what you eat and drink. Each of these everyday choices, decisions, and actions defines us and it’s amazing how much impact our everyday decisions have on others in the global village.
Coffee may arguably be the world’s leading commodity in terms of injustice generated. Our choice of coffee is a choice to either support the right of people to make a living farming their own land and to earn a just price for their crops, or to say we don’t care as long we privileged few in the mighty United States get what we want as inexpensively as we possibly can; we just don’t care if it causes someone else pain or damages the planet to the point of extinction. Hey, if we don’t care about it in Iraq, why should we bother over coffee? Maybe if we learned to bother over things like coffee, things like the war in Iraq wouldn’t start because we’d live in a culture that wouldn’t stand for it. And these are not just political issues. They are at rock bottom religious issues. Deeply and profoundly religious issues. If we as Unitarian Universalists truly mean what we say when we claim to value the diginity and worth of every person, then these can not be just pretty words we print on cards and bookmarks and hear in church on Sunday morning. Valuing the dignity and worth of every person means there’s really something wrong for 5 percent of us to use 50% of the world’s energy and resources. That’s devaluing a lot of other’s dignity and worth. Valuing the dignity and worth of every person means not ripping them off in order to have the least expensive cup of coffee available. There’s a way to play fair, however.
Fair Trade practices are simple. Coffee farmers are paid for their crop based on the international commodity price for coffee or the “C” price. Fair Trade sets an international minimum price floor so coffee farmers are never paid less than a set price for their crop, either $1.26 per pound for regularly farmed beans or $1.41 for organic beans. This way small farmers or cooperatives can’t be held hostage to the price fluctuations of the commodities market, which for coffee last year plummeted to less than thirty cents a pound. At that price the farmers can’t even cover the cost of growing, never mind feeding their families in a business that isn’t much above subsistence agriculture in some areas to begin with.
In addition to pricing, Fair Trade works with farmers to establish democratically run cooperatives. As stated on the Equal Exchange website,
“The concepts are not exotic or strange, in fact they're in every grade school civics book (or I would add, any Unitarian Universalist RE program):
* the right to vote (one vote per employee, not per share);
* the right to serve as leader (i.e. board director);
* the right to information;
* the right to speak your mind.
As Unitarian Universalists who covenant with each other around the principles of the dignity and worth of every person and democracy in our congregations and society at large, Fair Trade is right up our coffee hour.
Supporting Fair Trade coffee growers and coffee roasters is quite possibly the single most important social justice step a congregation can take. There is hardly any easier way to live out our principles as Unitarian Universalists on a weekly basis than purchasing and serving Fair Trade coffee. It’s a practice to take home from church into our kitchens.
What are we doing when we buy, serve or drink Maxwell House or Folgers? We are buying coffee from Kraft Foods and Proctor & Gamble two of the largest buyers and producers of coffee in the world. Neither of them care much at all for Fair Trade practices. The Boston Globe reported on Fair Trade in 2006 that:
“The United States consumes more coffee than any other country: 2.3 billion pounds each year. That's 23 times more than all certified fair trade sales in this country--ever. But more than 80 percent of it is the kind of low-quality conventional coffee you find in cans on the supermarket shelf: brands like Folgers and Maxwell House that are far more interested in buying cheap beans than worrying about fair trade certification.”[4]
Fair Trade has become just another flavor and marketing gimmick for a lot of coffee makers. Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters all have the Fair Trade label on some of their products, but in the case of Starbucks for example only 3.7% of their beans are Fair Trade. And Starbucks deals only in whole beans.[5] If you want to drink Fair Trade at a Starbucks you have to ask them to brew it for you special. Yet, Starbucks rarely follows their own company policy of brewing a pot of Fair Trade on demand.
This isn’t a dump on Starbucks, however. Although I’ve a bone to pick with Starbucks over coffee, there are many large corporations that might be able to learn some things from Starbucks as well. The book How Starbucks Saved My Life is the riches to rags biography of six figure salaried advertising executive Michael Gill, who when he lost his job, went to work at Starbucks and learned just how privileged he was. He also learned about classcism, racism, and teamwork from his younger diverse superiors on the job. But again, this isn’t about Starbucks, this is about Justice.
And Justice shouldn’t be a flavor; justice should be a way of life. Justice should be something you practice in everything you do, because Pathways and North Tarrant County is part of a village of billions and fair play is much harder in real life than in Monopoly. When we drink coffee, we should go for a decent cup of coffee. Not just on the basis of taste, but on the basis of justice. I hear that Pathways now serves recycled coffee, which is certainly a more sustainable cup of coffee.
Big Bend coffee from Marfa, Texas is one of the two dozen or so companies in the United States that roast 100% organic Fair Trade coffee. If you join us for coffee today that is the coffee you’ll drink. I think you’ll find it a decent cup of coffee and an easy way to live out our faith.
[1] http://www.hasbro.com/games/kid-games/monopoly/default.cfm?page=History/history
[2] http://www.hasbro.com/games/kidgames/monopoly/default.cfm?page=StrategyGuide/gametools
[3] http://www.sustainer.org/dhm_archive/index.php?display_article=vn338villageed - Donella H. Meadows of Dartmouth College published these statistics in the “state of the village” report for a village of 1000. Thinking in terms of 100 is even easier.
[4] http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/10/22/headline_fair_to_the_last_drop/
[5] http://www.organicconsumers.org/starbucks/index.cfm