Announcement

                                                                                                     3/6, 2010

Dear Sir or Madam,
I write this letter, because I have a proposal to make, since I realized that none of the products offered in your supermarket is marked as a product being produced in fair trade. If you ask me, it would be only profitable if you sold fair trade products aswell.

It goes without saying that I understand potential worries concerning the fact that these products are more expensive than most other ones, but please let me explain why according to me the advantages of these products outweigh the disadvantages.

Actually I had the idea of writing this letter after going to church today. For a few weeks now they have been offering all kinds of food produced in fair trade there. It was remarkable to see how many people-including me-bought those products. I even took the chance to buy things as presents for my relatives, since I wanted to take advantage of the chance of doing a good deed-namely to support peasants living in developing countries-while at the same time just caring for the physical well-being of my family and me.

Today for example our church really benefitted from those products, since-as I indicated before-there were a lot of people willing to spend their money this way. I presume this is not only a matter of religion teaching them to live the principle of charity, but also a psychological matter. People feel the need to be useful and of course they are glad to get offered a chance like that to do something that may help others.

Another example that proves how necessary it is to change your supplier is an educational. As far as I am informed things like fair trade and the poverty of developing countries were not thought at German high schools some decades ago. However our educational system has changed as you may know and so has our attitude towards this subject. To give you a personal example I can tell you that this very semester we have talked about it in social classes, geography and in religious education; let alone all the other semesters when we also had discussions about it in English. We students were told how important it was to buy fair trade products instead of products that don't have a fair trade label, also adding that we should even try to avoid the latter. We got to see multiple movies describing how even children are used for the production of those cheaper products. Some of my classmates who were rather emotional even had tears in their eyes when seeing how horrible those children got treated. Still this was not the only media we dealt with while talking about this: We read a newspaper article about how children get forced to do work in factories or in stone pits, how thus they don't have the chance to go to school. There was not a single student among us who did not understand that since-as they say-children are the future of a country, the political and thus economical future of those developing countries may be endangered at least for the following  generations aswell. In addition more and more teachers of social classes also ask questions about things that recently appeared in the news in their classtests and exams. I am well informed about the fact that a lot of newspapers and some magazines now focus on the situation of poor countries, also-and maybe especially-dealing with child labor. This also leads to the scientifically proven psychological factor that people want to help more-in this case by turning away from non-fair trade products. Some may be aware of this, while others aren't, but the more often a poor country is the subject of the news, the more it occurs to them that they can follow the change in this country thanks to customers-like them-only focusing on fair trade products.

Factors like these will make the selling of products that do not have a label identifying them as fair trade products hard if not impossible, according to what I've heard.

Thus it is just a well-intentioned, but also well-thought-out proposition I am making by describing the advantages of fair trade products in this letter. My message is just that I have good reasons to think that keeping your products instead of replacing them by fair trade products would do more harm than good. At least it is a worth considering suggestion and thus I hope you will take your time to think about it.

I thank you and I wish you a nice day.

                    Yours faithfully,
                                            Doris Schlapansky

This is an announcement, but also a demand for support! There is this user-let's call him John, although it isn't said that he's really male. Well, John really insulted a few friends of mine and me by sending us mean e-mails and even by talking bad about us in public chats. Apart from that I'm religious and thus some of the sexual allusions he made on this website really annoyed me although they weren't even indicated to anybody I know. Some of the rumors he spread about my friends were lies and you can be sure of that. These friends of mine just tolerated him, saying you'll find jerks everywhere anyway. However I recently had enough and I reported some of the racist and insulting comments this user continued to post, I copied some of the insulting e-mails he has sent to me, wanting to send them to englishbaby via the e-mail to ask the owner of this website to do something about him.

As I said before these friends didn't advise me to do so and usually I'm not like that. (For example I just remember one user who has put a video containing racism on my profile. I deleted it, told him to never do something like that again and since he listened to me I saw no need in reporting him.) However it slowly was getting serious and since John wouldn't stop being such a jerk towards us, (although I-as so many others-just ignored him and tried to stay polite nevertheless)  I considered some of the younger users in here to be really endangered.

I remember a story I once read in a newspaper: A boy got bullied by his classmates at school and by users on the Internet. In the end he was so depressed that he even said he wanted to die...

Concluding remark: As I said before I reported him, but I doubt that only one person reporting him will change anything about the situation. I mean: People shouldn't feel  gloating if they manage that someone gets thrown out of a forum, but in my opinion ignoring users like that is wrong. You may not care if you get insulted on the Internet, but others-like the boy who got mentioned in that newspaper-can't. Don't be shy to report people who get really insulting! It's for the best of everyone-including the user who gets banned. A friend of mine for example used to behave rude on the Internet, but when someone finally reacted, telling her to stop, she realized that her behavior was not tolerable, resulting in her becoming more handsome.

P.S. Some of you may be able to figure out who John really is, but I ask you not to post the real username in here. Thank you!