The Future of Retail - What Are Shops For?

A couple of years have now passed since the first self checkout gizmos made their appearance in my favourite supermarket.  Now we have online shopping as well, which we are told is the future of retail, implying that we had all better get used to it. Personally, I don’t much like the word ‘retail’. It smacks of cost effectiveness, which I resent. The handheld gizmos are cost effective presumably because they make it possible for shops to hire fewer people to run their checkouts. I like shops staffed by people. Fewer people running checkouts also means more people in my community without jobs. 

Added to this, is the sense of panic and the feeling of exposure to looking stupid which these gizmos induce. The gizmo seems to be waiting in its neat little rack for the anxious customer to do all the wrong things with it and finally have to turn to another human being for assistance, all of which takes twice as long as it would have done had the person opted for queuing at the checkout in the first place.

For people who live in the country or near a small town, as I do, shops supply more than food and the basics of life. They underpin community. For some, such as the elderly, the housebound or the lone parent, the visit to the local supermarket will be the only chance they have to speak to another adult, or even another living soul, all day. The best retail shops have made it their business to be interested in the human beings who buy their products. The people who work there get to know their customers. They are not just being friendly. The result is that the shops feel more like markets than supermarkets, something which should be encouraged, not only for social reasons, but also for the environmental knock-on effect of shopping carefully in one place.

 If we plan and only buy what we are going to need for the next week and try to cook it from scratch (rather than resorting to ‘instants’) as well as grow it, where possible, the cost along with the environmental damage caused by the car is reduced proportionately. We do not need to visit a supermarket every time we run out of something and end up buying (usually on impulse) three times as much as we should. Only one or two trips to the supermarket, as opposed to three or four also means less fuel. The same could be said to be true of online delivery services, but these services come with their own problems, like having to take food which we have ordered online back to the shop because it is sub standard or not what we ordered.

All of this is about getting the balance right between being human and being a consumer. Going to the shops is not just about shopping. It is, in a deeper sense, about communion. It is the opportunity to be together with other human beings, to hear their voices and know companionship, even if we don’t bump into someone we know personally, which is rare in small towns. These chance meetings, along with the general sense of being part of the wider community reflect the hospitality of God. They also invite joy and gratitude in experiencing, be it ever so slightly, his invitation to us to enjoy the fruits of the earth and benefit from the kind of technology which brings people together rather than turning them into atomised consumers.

Without gratitude we become increasingly isolated from one another and hence from the giver of all good things. Gratitude is the basis for all human happiness. It is given and received in all sorts of ways. Most of us experience it in a shared word or two with another person about the most trivial things, tiny moments of ordinary courtesy while standing in a queue, remarks about the weather and whatever is currently of interest to any one community, bits of news, thoughts and concerns about others or about what is going on in the world. For many people, such moments only happen in supermarkets. A quick ‘thank you’ to the delivery person does not quite do it. Neither does the cost effective self checkout gizmo, for all its promise of speed and efficiency.

Fracking - The Wrong Way up the Motorway

Ambiguous road signs cause accidents. Clear and unambiguous ones have the opposite effect. They dispel in an instant the distractions brought on by tiredness, thereby focusing the mind and saving lives. Think of going the wrong way up a one way street and multiply the feeling by a hundred for the moment you realise you are approaching a motorway on the wrong slip road. See the ‘wrong way’ sign and feel the fear. Now think of fracking.

 Fracking the earth for shale gas is the ‘Wrong Way’. The implications of fracking for the future of the planet are, when you pause to think about it, as frightening as approaching a motorway on the wrong slip road, without the time or the means of turning back.  

Fracking involves drilling at great depth, vertically and then horizontally, for long distances (it is not a small local operation) under the earth’s crust, causing it to crumble and disintegrate from within. This is brought about by the use of toxic chemicals and enormous quantities of water which, when combined, release methane and combine with other chemicals to poison the water that comes out of the kitchen tap. Residents of Butler County Pennsylvania, where extensive fracking is already being employed, report not only sudden attacks of projectile vomiting, headaches, strange rashes and the instantaneous death of a dog who had just drunk from a nearby water source. They also report incidents of water emerging from taps as fire.  

We can only begin to guess at the long term possibly irredeemable effect this activity may have on the fresh water we rely on for drinking, agriculture and the ongoing sustainability of the planet as a whole, not to mention our immediate surroundings were fracking to be employed in a place nearby, as it was for the residents of Poulton-le-Fylde near Blackpool. Added to this, is the internal and barely imaginable effect of smashing the very substance of the earth, what holds it together from within and keeps its relatively fragile surface intact. The earthquakes and tsunamis we have seen in the past couple of decades would bear no resemblance to the kind of whole scale and pretty well permanent devastation which the internal fracturing of the earth could bring about within a very short time scale. A British Geological Survey linked the two minor earthquakes near Blackpool which occurred on April 1^st and May 27^th 2011 to in depth fluid injection linked to the Preese Hall shale gas drilling site. The epicentre of the May quake was within 500 metres of the site.

It is not good enough to vaguely hope that somehow the scientists engaged in researching more viable ways of sustaining human life without damaging what it most depends on will find a solution and solve the problem in time. Neither can we trust that governments and the leaders of industry will see sense and that, when it comes to fracking, right thinking and preventive action will somehow prevail. Christians, the institutional Church and all people of faith need to act on this one before it is too late. Door to door petitions, lobbying MPs, and any kind of peaceful intelligent protest are urgently needed. Praying the Kingdom and making it happen in the here and now is what the Church is here to do, rather than destroying itself from within with its own fracking activities, its injustices, limited vision and its deeply divisive internal politics.  

Remembering Aright – How should Christians think about abuse they have suffered in the past?

The latest exposure of sex abuse by high profile men now in their eighties requires that Christians who have suffered abuse engage in some honest thinking, a way of thinking which will help both the victim and the perpetrator come to terms with the past, because this is the only way that healing can be effected. It is not just a matter of forgiving and forgetting. For the victim, and in some cases, for the perpetrator, the past does not go away that easily. We do not forget, and nor should we. The challenge therefore lies in remembering aright.

When a serial abuser cannot even remember a victim’s name, or denies abusing someone they know well, their feigned amnesia reveals the core of the sin itself, a callous indifference to another human being’s dignity and independence, something which consigns their very personhood, their existence even, to oblivion. This is the poison which is at the heart of abuse and which infects both abuser and victim alike. The abuser forfeits his own humanity as he denies the victim theirs.

How are Christians who have experienced abuse in childhood or in early adulthood to think of these men? What are they to do when seeing them in the news returns them as victims of abuse to their own ‘sheol’? ‘Sheol’ is a word used in scripture as a depiction of hell. It is a place of darkness, a place where personhood holds no meaning. Where personhood has been denied, our memories of abuse are hidden in a kind of suffocating darkness, the darkness of Sheol and for victims, as well as abusers, it can be tempting to leave them there.

But burying memories, or denying them, does nothing to restore those of us who have experienced abuse to the persons we once were before the abuse happened. Nor does it enable the abuser to face his own self and the truth about his actions. Both victim and perpetrator need to be restored to themselves, to the dignity of their own personhood if remorse, reparation and healing are to be effected. Nothing good can emerge and grow in the darkness of Sheol. Being consigned to Sheol does not allow the abuser to begin to take responsibility for his actions and for their long term effect on the lives of others, because in this place of darkness he cannot see those victims as persons, anymore than he can really see himself. Nor can he be made to face himself through the vicarious revenge many of us unconsciously enjoy at the sight of yet another high profile abuser being ‘outed’, even when ‘outing’ him is presented as long overdue justice. The public disgracing of old men has no power to heal, either them or their victims.

For those of us who experienced abuse at the hands of others, facing these particular abusive men with the fact that it is their victims’ humanity, their deepest selves, which was violated helps us to move a little further on from revenge, even when revenge comes in the guise of justice, after so many years of justice not having been done. Real justice happens when victims are finally believed and truth is admitted. It is when the victim is not believed or taken seriously that he or she suffers the greatest pain.

Not being believed about abuse makes it convenient, even obligatory, for the victim to be thought of as a liar in all other respects. Once a liar, always a liar. While being thought of as a liar, the victim also lives with the memory of being relegated to the status of plaything, of not being fully a person, and this will affect the way they think of themselves for the rest of their lives. So those who have experienced abuse in childhood and adolescence have been sinned against twice over, first by the abuser, and then by those who chose not to believe, or not to notice what was going on.

On the other hand, there are some who are being unfairly blamed for ‘hiding’ or ‘protecting’ abusers when, in fact, they were known to have informed their superiors, or those in authority, to the extent that was required and possible at the time. They too are being judged and condemned as liars. They are being judged in accordance with today’s expectations, as if the legislation relating to abuse and child protection, along with the more open channels for appeal and victim support which exist today, were in force and available to them then, which they were not.

            So what is the Christian who has suffered abuse in early life to make of this web of untruth and half truth and of their own enduring pain? It begs the question of how forgiveness and healing might work in these memories. We have to take it one day at a time. I think the best most of us can do at present is to allow ourselves to see the perpetrators of these acts, and all those who wittingly or unwittingly were connected with them, as persons who belong to a just, truthful and loving God as much as we, the victims, do. If, as Christians, prayer plays a part in our lives, we can begin by placing all these people, the guilty and those guilty by association, under his merciful regard, as we ourselves are under his merciful regard, especially when we are conscious of this during times of prayer.

Placing those who have sinned against us under the merciful regard of God is helpful in at least two ways; firstly, it prevents our own inclination to vindictiveness from getting a hold on us and so poisoning us from within. Secondly, it stops the inevitable burying of the pain (only for it to return later) because we are ‘outing’ the pain itself by bringing it to God, along with the abuser and those who may have colluded with him. We bring all of it to the foot of the cross, again and again, and leave it there, again and again. Then we accept ourselves as honoured and loved from that place and know ourselves not as liars, but truthful, and we carry on living.