Kathryn Jonas and Her Revolutionary Book (And It’s Not a Hippy Rant)

Tuesday 12 June 2007

In May I had the great good fortune to spend some time with Emily Weiss, who graduated from SLU in 2003. She’s been working in Chicago with Amnesty International, and was in town on a speaking tour with photographer and activist Jonathan Moller. While at Jonathan’s event at Left Bank Books, I saw Kathryn Jonas, a sophomore at SLU, who informed me of the recent success of SLU’s United Students against Sweatshops initiative to get the University affiliated with the Workers Rights Consortium. Emily later said to me that Jonas had been working for years with Amnesty and was a “total rock star”–my translation: She’s maximally cool, very sharp, and highly committed. Kathryn was a student of one of my students, Cab Gutting (now Yau) at Incarnate Word Academy a few years back. She was recently quoted in a Saint Louis Post-Dispatch editorial for her work with Jonathan and Amnesty. And now I have the pleasure of having her in my summer Social Justice class. Never before have I had a student who identified as “Yiddish-American.”

She wrote a piece last week on the topic “The Work I Most Want to do and Why” and this is what she read aloud to us…

I want to work for human rights, specifically, labor rights. I want to ensure that each person receives a living wage. I want people to be seen for who they are and not just what they can produce. I want to work to reform our open market system so that it no longer benefits Advanced Industrialized Countries and oppresses Lesser Developed Countries. I want to reform the WTO, the IMF, and the IBRD so that they do what they’re really supposed to be doing: ensure fair trade and give aid to help countries develop. I want to write a book that revolutionizes our utilitarian liberal economic theories and creates a new economic order based on personalism, respect for human dignity and the realization that this is actually more productive in the long run. I want this book to be not just a hippie rant but sound economic theory that shows all those economist snobs you don’t need Calc III to understand economics and you can have profit and still respect persons. I want to prove once and for all that utilitarianism is a failure and bring an end to basing all economic decisions on what we coolly calculate as the greatest good for the greatest number of people. My book will base hard economic theory on the idea that individual needs must be sacrificed for the common good but we can never sacrifice human dignity. My book will prove that this theory will not only work, but it’s really the most rational and it’s possible! All we need is to forget about ourselves for a minute and realize that before we can truly be happy, successful, wealthy, efficient, and all that jazz we must first ensure the dignity of each individual so that we can all together reach happiness, success, wealth, efficiency, and all that jazz.

So I’ll publish this book, it’ll be amazing, there’ll be riots in the streets, change begins, people start to believe, individualism will collapse, people will be lifted from poverty, world peace, and then I’ll retire.

Maybe I’ll teach. Talk about how my revolutionary book all started with a journal entry I had to do for a class.