Last week, I listened to an episode of This American Life while on my normal evening walk with the dog.  Most podcasts serve as little more than background noise as most of my attention is focused on preventing the pup from ingesting any number of harmful items along the side of the road.  But this episode really struck me, and has been persistently present in the back of my mind for several days now.

Titled "Mr Daisy and the Apple Factory", the podcast featured a dramatic monologue by actor Mike Daisy, narrating the events of his visit to the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China--the manufacturing spot for most Apple products.  Mike Daisy was not really offering an expose of unknown exploitative practices at the factory.  Rather, he simply told stories of the workers he met in an around the factory town--the underage children forced to work 12-hour shifts; the young adults who have already experienced debilitating injuries from the repetitive motions required of their unchanging place on the assembly line.  Daisy's main objective seemed to be to put a human face on the various products that have come to form the backbone of our everyday lives.

You can see a bit of the monologue in this clip here:

What's interesting to me is that I happened across this podcast in the same week that the Foxconn factory has again been featured in the news regarding the working conditions of its labourers (and, indeed, Apple has recently submitted to greater transparency in the wake of increased suicide threats from Chinese workers).

What really gets me about this is that I listened to that podcast on my shiny i-pod touch.  I am sitting in my office in the church typing this blog entry on my Apple computer.  Leeman and I have an i-mac and a macbook pro at home.  I might not be an Apple CEO, but I am culpable for the exploitation that goes on in those factories because I am part of the system that has created the problem.

And the problem is not just about Apple in particular, or electronic gadget in general.  I felt the same despondency when I watch the documentary Food Inc. The banana I ate on my cereal this morning was brought to me by forms of transportation that are ravaging the earth.  The coffee I am sipping at the moment was likely the product of even greater exploitation of workers than my laptop.

The more I think about it, the way we use and consume products seems like a perfect illustration of the concept of original sin.  We aren't always comfortable with the language of "sin" in the church today--we especially aren't comfortable when someone starts telling us that even little babies are tainted with a black mark before they have taken their first breath.  But maybe the concept of original sin is just this.  Just the fact that we are born into this broken system which we are powerless to fix as an individual.  We have to eat.  We need to be able to communicate in an increasingly digital world. But participating in that system inevitably means violating human rights and violating basic tennets of social justice.

What are we to do?

Fortunately, our faith assures us that there is a point coming when Christ will make the world right.  God will win.  Justice will prevail against inequality and exploitation.  We need not despair over the state of the world and our seeming inability to make a real difference.

In the meantime--even though it is not on us to triumph over sin once and for all--we are called to strive to build the kingdom of God in there here and now in whatever small ways we can.  Maybe we don't have the power to opt out of the electronics game altogether.  But we do have the power to decide how often we really need a new computer or the latest model of i-phone.  When it comes to our food, we can make a commitment to buy as much in-season local produce as possible, or to buy only traditionally raised meat.

It's true that no one of us on our own can solve the problem of our sinful, broken world.  But we can allow Christ to transform us and the choices we make.  Who knows what impact that might make?