Author: leftistsofwooster

How Capitalism Warps Our Relationship With Food

By Echo (Pseudonym)

CONTENT WARNING FOR FOOD AND EATING MENTIONS.

Now that spring break is over, we’re officially in the tail end of the semester, which for many people (including me) means it’s time to ration meal swipes. As you probably know, none of the Wooster meal plans provide students with three meals a day: even the largest meal plan provides 18 swipes a week, which comes up three meals short of the 21 required to eat three every day. As someone who never gets breakfast from the school, though, my personal struggle is about convenience and time. Knowlton provides a pick-up lunch in a calm environment that isn’t as loud, unpleasant, and far from my classes as Lowry is. Plus, there’s no mental pressure on me to get the most “bang for my buck” and eat a huge and time-consuming meal, unlike the all-you-can-eat buffet style of Lowry. Thus, the weeks before finals are either fully or partly interspersed with days where a meal is a bowl of cereal, tea, and whatever free snacks I can hoard from campus events. As I look back on the money I spent during spring break and the money I’m going to need to have for some upcoming expenses – medicines, a gender-affirming product that ranges from $30 – $55, and the cost of the summer storage program – I feel that familiar anxiety. While I have never had an eating disorder, I have had my perception of food and hunger warped by monetary concerns. Sometimes, with money anxiety pressing in, it feels like it’s not horrible to go hungry until a friend can swipe me in for dinner, or until I can find the time in my busy days to cook if I have pasta. This is further complicated by my gastrointestinal issues that necessitate dietary restrictions. While this may sound dramatic to some, wondering why I can’t just get over it and buy food – shouldn’t I be able to when it’s necessary? Why be sparing with necessities? This is a question I try to throw at myself all the time – there’s unfortunately often that nagging sentiment that I’m sure plagues many people in one way or another. “If you can go without it, that means you don’t need it.” Capitalism warps our perception of many of our most basic physiological needs: food with its monetary cost, sleep with its cost of not staying up and doing more work, doing more something, and our need to rest from pain, especially when we have very little choice but to work through it to provide for ourselves and others. And obviously this lack of meeting our needs makes us sicker and weaker, which is bad for our own sake. Capitalism preys on keeping people sick and weak, and often despondent. This is why genuine self-care (the not hyper-commercialized version) is so important, as many more people have said long before me.

Luckily, there is some respite. The food pantry in Babcock can sometimes offer a delicious bright spot in this unpleasant time. Friends or strangers with meal swipes to spare can take a lot of worrying off people’s shoulders, even if just for a bit. And free campus events that provide food or snacks, if you have the energy to walk to them – scrumptious! This ending is not meant to minimize the difficulty of this time, and of the food insecurity and often tied-up money anxiety that many people face during college, as well as out of it. It’s here to let you know that you’re not alone if you’re also facing the harsh meal environment that’s the back third of the semester. And also, that if you have the resources, you could organize a meal swipe exchange with friends or even acquaintances who you know are running low (an idea introduced to me by Woo Mutual Aid) or donate to the food pantry in Babcock Hall. The food pantry also takes other types of donations, such as menstrual products, and according to posters around the school, is currently reachable at _co_corner_ on Instagram. 

WMA Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/woomutualaid/

I Walk The Line: Climate Doomerism and Climate Denialism

By G.P. (Pseudonym)

We are in a crisis, due to capitalist activity our planet’s temperature is changing, and we will see the effects of this change throughout our lives. Should we give up? Will we just accept this fate? Is there anything that we can do? These questions come up regularly when discussing climate change in a lot of the sphere of our lives. These are valid concerns one may have. It can feel helpless seeing what is happening in the world and that one is just yelling into the void of elected officials, even friends and family, who do not (or will not) address what is happening before our eyes.

Let’s face it, we can better imagine the end of the world where it is still capitalistic, than a sustainable world that is non-capitalistic. We have been raised in a capitalist society, taught in a capitalist society, and told repeatedly that the only way to live is in a capitalist society. Any other society that dares to try anything else, we are told, is doomed to fail. Capitalism, however, historically has been one of the root causes of climate change in our society. From the continued pursuit of wealth, we (white Europeans) have stripped the Earth of its resources. From coal mines to oil pipelines, we have constantly put profits ahead of people and the environment we live with.

I believe that there is a major disconnect between white settlers and the Earth itself. We see the Earth as a playground, a place to rip apart and put back together as we please. We separate ourselves from other species around us, thinking that we are more advanced. Capitalism also drives home that idea of taking more than we need, and only giving back the smallest amount necessary to our community and the Earth that gives us all we need. Remember, you cannot eat money and you cannot breathe toxic fumes. Addressing this flaw is critical to repairing our connection to this great Earth.

Even though we have a long road ahead of us, there are glimmers of hope in the darkness. Renewable energy is more accessible than ever, which means that countries do not have to go through the process of burning fossil fuels to support early infrastructure. Speaking of coal, the use of fossil fuels has started to decrease globally. The greatest accomplishment, however, in my opinion, is you! Yes, you! The one who took the time to read this little article fully! Learning is half the battle, and hopefully this article inspires some deeper introspection and discovery of what is happening in our world. We may not be able to make waves, but we can all make ripples! I will also be listing some additional materials if you would want to learn more about what is being done to change things in these trying times. Enjoy!

3000-year-old solutions to modern problems | Lyla June | TEDxKC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH5zJxQETl4 

We WILL Fix Climate Change!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxgMdjyw8uw

What It Means To Be a Leftist (At Wooster)

By Harun Al-Rashid (Pseudonym)

Throughout my involvement with Leftists, I have either seen others wondering about it or I myself have wondered, “What does it mean to be a leftist- more specifically, at Wooster?” This mainly comes to mind when discussing the club’s mission, save our asses (read: meet requirements) from Student Engagement, or to recruit people and keep LoW alive. Many people involved in this discussion may refuse to look at it as an existential question (because who likes doing philosophy), but I think the underlying factor is that crippling existential crisis, “How do I myself be a Leftist? I recognize there is something majorly wrong with this capitalistic society I live in, and how can I understand/change things as a CoW student?

I am hoping these underlying questions formed LoW. To my anecdotal knowledge, its “predecessor” (WooScram? Unsure of spelling) is the “radical socialist group who threatened Sarah Bolton” that is the talk of Wootown (the college). Then, we formed. Attempting to avoid the scandalous scars of our horrid past, we became a group welcoming all kinds of leftist thoughts and people, integrating both “bookish stuff” (theory) and “protest stuff” (praxis).

Unfortunately, we never tried to answer the existential crisis this whole time. As a non-American, this is what saddens/frustrates me –that my North American peers are troubled by this crisis, but the very capitalism they hate has grasped them to the point of no escape, hindering their ability to challenge it. As a result, we, and our actions, keep falling apart; we have too many disagreements between our own people. Truly, it is all surface-level leftism.

If you have read this far and are questioning my credibility in writing this article, I joined LoW in fall 2020, and served as president from Aug-Sept 2022. I ran for presidency as no one else was in Spring 2022, in fear that we would get discontinued (lose our charter). I got increasingly closer with the people; part of my anecdotal knowledge comes from them, and part from the Inter-Club Kettletea Yearners (ICKY). I experienced the surface-levelness firsthand, and unfortunately, was victimized by it as well. I resigned. 

Currently, I am not an active member of the club. Avoiding the existential crisis not only harms my North American peers, but also ends up harming (much more intensely) their non-North American peer. That is a discussion for another article.

I still see glimpses of hope in this void. One of them being the chief editor of this newsletter and current co-president of LoW, who is very graciously letting me shit on the club. I met them through LoW, and this comrade has been with me through my joys and woes. Other glimpses of hope are several faculty and staff at this college, and another being some fellow Woo-townees. These folks (I wish I could name them all) have taught me what leftism is- the true, genuine feelings of love for people, hoping for the greatest prosperity and flourishing for everyone, and true, genuine feelings of anguish & fury for anything that stops this love. These fellow comrades genuinely love and care about their community, are genuinely hurt and angered by their fellow comrades’ struggles and will do anything to help. It is ironic that I experienced true leftism mostly outside of this club. It shows our failure to love and hope, our failure to break the individualist bubble and feel overwhelming waves of sorrow when our fellow comrades are tortured, or assaulted, or shot.

I hope for a day when my peers get to experience this, very soon.

A Short History of CoW’s Living Wage Campaign

By G. (Pseudonym)

The Wooster Living Wage Campaign (LWC) was formed in 2016 to fight against the poverty-level wages of hourly workers at the college, which were $7.50/hr at the time. (This was poverty-level even for full-time workers, necessitating many of them to take on multiple jobs.) LWC’s first big protest came the same year, and, armed with data from a recent staff job satisfaction survey conducted by a staff liaison committee, they created a presentation about why the minimum wage at the college should be raised. The Board of Trustees was impressed by their research (according to one of LWC’s early faculty supporters, Religious Studies professor Dr. Charles Kammer), and it may have partially helped motivate them to raise the wage later. It certainly helped serve as a catalyst for LWC.. According to an interview by Ajay Bedesha ‘18 with Dr. Charles Kammer, a former religious studies professor at the college, the seeds for the movement had been laid in 2011, when, feeling that they were not being properly compensated, faculty had supported a resolution to cut the wages of the lower-paid hourly staff in order to raise their own. This showed either a startling lack of awareness of hourly workers’ wages, or an extreme degree of selfishness. By 2018, however, in part because of the efforts of LWC, faculty were interacting somewhat more with staff (particularly at staff appreciation events), and the minimum wage at the college had been raised to $11. A second notable protest occurred on October 26th, 2018,when LWC gathered approximately 200 students at a board of trustees meeting to show that students supported living wages for hourly staff. They were met with the response that students should try to convince former president of the college Sarah Bolton to throw her support behind living wages. While of course college presidents are themselves complicit in many injustices, this feels like another instance of the evident scapegoating they are subject to as a conveniently visible figure. In addition to correspondence with the president, the LWC concurrently started a change.org petition demanding the minimum hourly wage be raised to $14.08 (the living wage at the time in Wooster: it is now approximately $15). While this petition did not meet its goal of 1500, it racked up 1313 signatures. LWC’s most recent large action took place in April of 2019 when they held a panel with Sarah Bolton, other admin, and faculty, where Bolton gave many predictably deflective and bureaucratic answers. Then, COVID befell the world, and the strong team that LWC had built for themselves graduated with few to replace them, plans for the future sitting stagnant in their archives. Today the Living Wage Campaign is small, though it is still going, and it can certainly be said it has a strong and proud history.