Clump #105:  Confront and pare down gift list with online purchases.

I have been declumping every day, but the truth is, I’ve been avoiding my Christmas gift list.  Like an armadillo curled up and in denial.  Today has been Cyber Monday, a day for online shopping, a good time to break out of my funk.  Tomorrow is Giving Tuesday.  I listened to a woman talk about Giving Tuesday this morning on the radio.  Her comments ended with a quote from The Dalai Lama: “It’s not enough to be compassionate.  You must act.”

The company, TOMS One for One, makes it easy to shop online and give to a good cause.  Its website, toms.com, describes the company’s origin: “In 2006, American traveler Blake Mycoskie befriended children in a village in Argentina and found they had no shoes to protect their feet.  Wanting to help, he created TOMS, a company that would match every pair of shoes purchased with a pair of new shoes given to a child in need.  One for One.”  Offering shoes expanded to glasses, and then to all sorts of cool gift items.  I liked a necklace with a whistle as a pendant, and read that it was “A replica of the symbol that sparked the Falling Whistles movement … It serves as a reminder to be a whistle blower for peace … you are helping Falling Whistles rebuild war-torn communities in Congo.”

I looked up the Falling Whistles movement, and was appalled and, well, moved.  In the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, “whistleblowers: child soldier too small to hold guns, sent to the front lines of crossfire, armed only with a small whistle.  Their sole responsibility was to make enough noise to attract and alarm the enemy, and then receive — with their bodies — the first line of gunfire. Serving as a protective barrier of sorts for their armed counterparts, these boys had to fien death — or die.  Thus was launched Falling Whistles, an organization and movement which purposes these tools for combat as necklaces.  As such they become symbols of peace, not weapons of war.”

As so often happens, the synchronistic quote that came my way couldn’t have been more appropriate: