Charity

We believe businesses should aim to help improve our communities and create lasting, positive change in our society.  We also feel, if we don’t have enough wealth to create much change alone, why not donate to a non-profit or a community organization that does work we believe in?  To that end, we are donating five dollars from every single item sold to a different non-profit organization of our choosing, twice a year (when we aren’t brand new, then we can afford to donate more).

Autumn/Winter 2020 Charitable Donation honoring Facing History and Ourselves 

“If you don’t know your history, then you don’t know anything.  You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.”

-Michael Crichton

Michael Crichton is a science-fiction author whose books and screenplays are the works behind film productions such as Westworld, Jurassic Park, and The Andromeda Strain.  It seems fitting then, that he would be the source of the words above.  In a world growing ever-increasingly integrated with technology, we as human beings are constantly faced with both the negative and positive repercussions of this steady encroachment. 

One of the double-edged aspects of technological growth is our access to information.  On one hand, we have freedom of access to a broad range of new data and facts at our fingertips in the tiny phones most of us carry with us, daily.  On the other hand, the extent to which most of us use these devices to learn about our own past or our collective history is relatively infrequent.  It would seem, during the onset of the “information age,” a time when we can record our most benign musings and share them with the world in an instant, we are growing increasingly obsessed with immediate gratification and trying to predict the future, rather than trying to understand, reflect upon and learn from our past. 

Yet, as information becomes more widely accessible, we are also more likely to have the opportunity to learn about people we may see as vastly different from ourselves.  We can hear and process their points of view and try to learn to empathize with them, even if we can’t immediately sympathize. These interactions help us deepen our understanding of ourselves, as well as others.  By learning about others, we often find we are not alone in feeling afraid, feeling vulnerable, and feeling challenged by all the different things we encounter throughout life.

Self-awareness, understanding, self-acceptance and respect are the basis for healing and learning to grow beyond our own personal pain and insecurities.  And mutual awareness, understanding and respect are how different people can learn to love and accept one another.  How can our country grow and heal together when so much of our American history is missing from our history books and classrooms?  The simple answer is, it can’t. 

That is why the organization to which we are choosing to donate this season is, Facing History & Ourselves, a non-profit which focuses on integrating more African American history into our public education systems’ curricula.  The programs created by FH&O aim to also introduce ethical and introspective concepts designed to teach students to empathize with the hardships faced by other people who have shared both similarities to and differences from themselves, throughout our history. 

Aside from Indigenous Americans, African Americans are one of the oldest American racial minority demographics which continues to represent a large portion of our population today.  Having arrived in waves since the first Spanish colonialists came to this continent about 600 years ago, the story of slavery is only one aspect of this highly complex ethnic migration.  It is a much more nuanced tale full of both agonizing pain, and heroic progress – and the long list of Black Americans who have made tremendous, seemingly super-human strides in the history of our nation is often overshadowed by abysmal tails of hardship.  Additionally, in comparison to European history, the average public school curriculum’s coverage of African and African American history is essentially negligible.  Yet peoples from both of these continents played an inextricable part in the formation and growth of our nation since its inception.

We believe it is invaluable for all Americans to understand the full history depicting the strength and progress made by Black Americans since the time of slavery, in addition to learning more about the many nuanced ways by which the progress of Black Americans has also been deliberately thwarted and halted by various policies enacted by our fellow citizens and our government throughout the century and a half following the abolition of slavery.  American history may be uncomfortable at times, but the stories of heroism demonstrated by many “average” Americans are just as numerous as the stories of violence and pain.  We believe future generations of children should be learning these stories, outside of just the month of February. 

Racism will always continue to thrive, unless it becomes eroded by mutual understanding and respect.  Introducing more robust coverage of our country’s entire history into our schools’ curricula seems to be as good a starting point as any, toward reaching the goal of gradually transforming and healing that pain which flows like a violent undercurrent throughout the collective subconscious of all American society today.