There are a multitude of causes around the worked each worthy in its own right.  Some are more in need than others.  Some are only causes in the name of a cause.  The word itself is speculative cause yet we find more allure in individual operations.  It is truly with great valor and honorability that we recognize the action of such causes, but with some hesitancy I would assert.  It seems that in a time of rapid technology and popular culture the increasing source of epistemological reckoning we fall prey to fetishism.  I have discussed in my talks about academic and intellectual fetishism.  Fetishism is referred to most often in sexual contexts.  The act of fetish is indulging in as a sense of “deviant” behavior that is an obsession produced by an egoic thirst (see Sigmund Freud).  Causes have become a fetish taken up by those with kind hearts and imaginations.  The more causes that are taken up the more causes that are produced to address those causes and thus and endless cycle of causes occur by an affective causation.  Ironic isn’t it.  So how do we navigate and negotiate causes in order to understand how we are attempting to bring about an end by our means rather than a continual supply of means with no end?  We must find meaning in ourselves that promotes us to stand for a cause that may encompass or willfully incorporate several causes under one distinct meaningful approach.  We must not take pleasure in causes but pain.  Sympathy is the oppressors understanding that his position is safe and distance from the oppressed.  Empathy attempts to provide a relational consciousness within the oppressed and victimized.  Charity is an oppressive tool that teases unknowingly.  Not all charitable negotiations are this way.  It should be understood that charity is not the empathetic consciousness but the sympathetic.  It leaves a noticeable distance form the charitable producer and the consumer of such charity.  In many cases the sympathy stimulates a brief moment of contentment that the charity has somehow participated in an active agency to better the situation.  It is nothing more in this case but a tithing of aberration for the charitable.  It is a cause which causes them to feel elated.  What dreams they rest with easily do not incorporate the stark and desperate realities of those whose charity they will receive.  At times I am cynical of the world and the cycle of charity.  Charity keeps alive the dead and the terminally oppressed.  At his point we can return to the original discussion of causes.  To take up a cause is to take up a life.  A life that is responsible not for the self, but for those that it aims to affect.  Education is a cause in its own right.  Though in understanding education as a cause it is not complete, absolute, nor terminable until death.  Time is irrelevant in understanding cause.  With a swift blow one movement is erased and another one takes its place.  We must caution ourselves in taking up causes.  It is not an easy task or one that promises great reward.  If anything there is certainty of consequence, pain, and relinquishing of what one enjoys in order to participate as an advocate and a possible constituent.  Great revolutionaries have understood that causes are devised by those who are often not constituents of them.  We feel sympathy for the suffering of a group but would refuse to trade places, to momentarily emancipate an individual.  When one refuses to give up his or her life even in an abstract hypothetical proposal then that person not only understands their position, they have strengthened it.  The strengthening of such positions continues to promote a cycle of dominance, unearned privilege, oppression, and willful neglect.  Charity becomes the financial penalty for refusing such hypothetical terms.  It is the opium needed to intoxicate the mind as it drifts into an abstract reality filled with sympathy and comfort.  Life is comfortable for those who are not within a cause.  Those who do not receive charity are comfortable in the leisure and ability to not be so.  We cannot condemn the charitable, sympathetic, and good intentioned.  We can, however, attempt to convey a consciousness and empathetic realization among those who are quick to give and take but not partake.  So much as we critically discuss these unknowing benevolents they are the advocacy and agents of transformation.  With clarity and willingness to be what they are objecting they become like the other which loses its rigid categorical form in place of self-affiliation.  So to the missionaries who give conditionally what has been taken away from you that heeds such condition for charity and cause.  Such understanding of support or “cause” must be negotiated diligently or we fall into a mindless fetish of causes for the sake of having a cause.

Antonio Garcia

Indiana University