Sherry Chandler

I don’t know whether it was mentioned in the New York Times article I quoted yesterday because I didn’t finish reading it, but Terry at I See Invisible People calls on us to remember that much of the world’s fine chocolate comes at a high cost — child slavery. According to The International Labor Rights Fund:

The fact that child slaves are used in the harvesting of cocoa beans in Cote D’Ivoire (Ivory Coast - ed), the world’s major supplier of cocoa, is undisputed. The US State Department estimates that there are approximately 15,000 children working on cocoa, coffee, and cotton farms in the Cote D’Ivoire. In June 2001, the ILO also reported that trafficked child labor was used in cocoa production in West Africa. Media reports have unveiled stories about boys tricked or sold into slavery, some as young as nine years old, to work on cocoa plantations in Cote d’Ivoire.

Fair Trade chocolate is available. Consider it if you plan to give sweets to your sweetie.

Lincoln Memorial University’s Mountain Heritage Festival, under the directorship of Kentucky’s own Silas House, is seeking entries for their 2007 contests in Young Adult Fiction, Short Story, Poetry and Essay. Guidelines here.

The Young Adult Fiction category will be judged by George Ella Lyon and the Poetry by Maurice Manning. $10 entry fee. Postmark deadline May 25, 2007.

The festival runs June 22-24, 2007.

From All Quiet on the Western Front (Fawcett Crest, 1975), translated from the German by A. W. Wheen, first published 1928:

Naturally we couldn’t blame Kantorek for this. Where would the world be if one brought every man to book? There were thousands of Kantoreks, all of whom were convinced that they were acting for the best—in a way that cost them nothing.

And that is why they let us down so badly.

For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, to the future. We often made fun of them and played jokes on them, but in our hearts we trusted them. The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom. But the first death we saw shattered this belief. We had to recognize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs. They surpassed us only in phrases and in cleverness. The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces.

While they continued to write and talk, we saw the wounded and dying. While they taught that duty to one’s country is the greatest thing, we already knew that death-throes are stronger. But for all that we were no mutineers, no deserters, no cowards—they were very free with all these expressions. We loved our country as much as they; we went courageously into every action; but also, we distinguished the false from the true, we had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that there was nothig of their world left. We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.

Watched Flags of our Fathers last night as a sort of preparation to seeing Letters from Iwo Jima. I was four days old when the battle of Iwo Jima began and eight days old when the famous flag-raising took place, so I have lived all my life with this legend. I knew, in a vague sort of way, how the event ruined Ira Hayes — hard to miss Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Kinky Friedman singing “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” — but I didn’t even know the names of the other two survivors. They were an interesting mix — one Native American, one son of French Canadian immigrants, and one white bread funeral director.

I don’t know whether Flags of our Fathers is a great movie but I think it’s an important one because, like the Remarque novel, it tries to make us see the reality, not the mythology of war. It’s a lesson we seem to have to relearn every generation. The film ends with this quote from James Bradley, son of one of the surviving flag-raisers and author of the book on which the film is based:

I finally came to the conclusion that maybe he was right, maybe there are no such things as heroes, maybe there are just people like my dad, I finally came to understand why they were so uncomfortable being called heroes. Heroes are something we create, something we need. It’s a way for us to understand what is almost incomprehensible, how people could sacrifice so much for us, but for my dad and these men the risks they took, the wounds they suffered, they did that for their buddies. They may have fought for their country but they died for their friends, for the man in front, for the man beside him, and if we wish to truly honor these men we should remember them the way they really were the way my dad remembered them.