Page 12 THE SAUGUS ADVOCATE – Friday, July 19, 2019 Wakefield Farmers Market brings local farm fare, specialty foods and artisan products to Hall Park E ach Saturday through October 12, 2019, the Wakefield Farmers Market will be located next to Veterans Field (GPS 468 North Ave Wakefield MA). The Saturday, July 27 market will feature lots of local and freshly picked fruits and veggies, flower bouquets that will last for weeks, the yummiest baked goods and breads, syrups, jellies and jams you can only find here. As always, the Market will have a cooking demo, balloon twisting, henna and kids’ activity tent stocked with drawing materials – plus hula hoops, jump ropes and sidewalk chalk, and special events throughout the season. It’s a great place to shop, have a picnic, play or just hang out on the shore of Lake Quannapowitt. Wakefield Town Council members will be answering questions, meeting folks and offering voter registration. Justina Langone, the owner of The Remedy Exchange, which is located at 41 Tuttle St. in Wakefield, will be guest chef in the Market Kitchen Tent. She will be preparing a delicious and healthy dish using produce chosen that morning from the Market’s farmers, thanks to Wakefield Co-operative Bank, the Market Kitchen Tent and Farm/ Food Education sponsor. Here are the vendors expected on July 27: A&D Books, Aaronap Cellars, BOrganics, Coutts Specialty Foods, Deano’s Pasta, Emmett’s Edibles, Farmer Dave’s, Fay Mountain Farm, Flats Mentor Farm, Fork On a Road, Goodies Homemade, Habibi Gourmet Food, Halvah Heaven, Kelly’s Farm, Li~ Guest Commentary ~ Betsy Ross recall is a cheap moral stand By Lewis Waha N ike courted controversy when it cancelled a new line of Betsy Ross flag–stitched sneakers just before the Fourth of July. The American shoemaker, valued at over $130 billion, pulled the shoes after former NFL quarterback and company spokesperson Colin Kaepernick worried on Twitter that the flag was a racist symbol. Anyone claiming moral leadership ought to consider why there was a backlash. It’s not simlac Hedge Farm, Pour Man’s Coffee, Roasted Granola, Roberto’s Seafood, Single Barrel Cellar, Sarah’s Original, Sheepshed, Swiss Bakers, The Bread Shop, Tower Beverages, Ugly Baby Soap Co. and West River Creamery. The market offers “Market Bucks” that can be purchased for use with vendors via credit/debit cards or SNAP/EBT, and will again be matching SNAP purchases up to $10 per visit so that everyone can afford to get fresh and healthy foods at the Wakefield Farmers Market. For HIP benefits, be sure to shop with Farmer Dave’s. The Wakefield Farmers Market runs rain or shine except in dangerous weather (e.g., lightning or hurricane conditions). The market opens at 9:00 a.m. and closes at 1:00 p.m. every Saturday through October 12, 2019. Please visit www. wakefieldfarmersmarket.org for a current listing of vendors, live music and special events and to sign up for the Market’s email newsletter. You can also find the Market on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr. See you at the Market! Everett Aluminum 10 Everett Ave., Everett 617-389-3839 Owned & operated by the Conti family since 1958 • 57 Years! “Same name, phone number & address for family since 1958 • 61 over half a century. We must be doing something right!” •Vinyl Siding •Free Estimates •Carpentry Work •Fully Licensed •Decks •Roofing • Fully Insured • Replacement Windows www.everettaluminum.com Now’s the time to schedule those home improvement projects you’ve been dreaming about all winter! ply due to middle America’s hypersensitivity to the trashing of national symbols. The hypocrisy is real when a major corporation represents itself as “moral” to a narrow constituency while at the same time putting off everyone else. Aggravating cultural division in a time of deep polarization is anything but moral. Some observers explain away Nike’s offensive move as consistent with its established branding strategy. The Wall Street Journal reports that the shoemaker’s core customers – adolescent males – value brands that “get involved in social issues, have a moral message and express views even if they are controversial.” On CNBC, one CEO observed, “When you start to stray into using a version of the flag that has different meaning for different people, that’s a line you don’t want to cross.” Never mind that flags, like all symbols, always mean different things to different people. The above observations notwithstanding, the sneaker flop contradicts Nike’s branding at least two ways. First, recall the company capitalized on Kaepernick’s image last fall with an ad featuring his face and the caption superimposed: “Believe in something, even if it costs you everything.” Back then, the quarterback was a plausible symbol of conscientious dissent, a hero speaking truth to the powerful NFL. But the spokesman’s role is different this time. Rather than positively expressing what he believes, he’s effectively dictating what Nike – and anyone downstream from their influence – must not express. He’s gone from dissident martyr to censoring cleric, an inconsistency that makes for a culture war loss. Likening Kaepernick to a puritanical religious authority is no stretch. The Washington Post covered the flag’s potential racism as a prospective “contamination.” Rightly suggesting that people of good will should not readily surrender symbols to racists, Alyssa Rosenberg discussed the flag’s possible racist associations in terms of taint, poison, and desecration. This matches how social and legal theorists think about racism. Even if Kaepernick and Nike’s executives are sincere, they are operating within a group morality that, like all others, casts judgments, pronounces taboos, and declares what’s sacred and what’s profane. To be moral in this sense is to police a moral community according to the judgment of its authorities, which leaves those who don’t accept its judgments feeling coerced or excluded. It’s a discomfiting tension for progressives to live with, given that these are the evils they like to tilt against. Just because a corporation’s fan base, its peers, and even presidential candidates eat up and defend its branding doesn’t make it moral. At best, this is only winning the approval of one’s own tribe. Because corporate brands build loyalty through individuals’ voluntary acts of association, their authority is parochial at best. There’s nothing wrong with collecting together a band of people who “believe in something.” But if Senator Ben Sasse is right, what we think of as tribes are often antitribes. The danger is that believing in something slips into being against something and being against some others closely identified with that thing. There’s a second way Nike’s shoe cancellation contradicts its branding: it didn’t “cost everything.” Rather, the company gained billions of dollars in market value by its iconoclasm. According to The Journal, company founder Phil Knight told a business school audience earlier this year, “It doesn’t matter how many people hate your brand as long as enough people love it.” He may as well have endorsed profit at any cost, frayed national political climate be damned. This devil-may-care attitude seems out of step with the corporate social responsibility ethos that progressives embrace. That imperative has firms look beyond maximizing shareholder value to the interests of stakeholders like factory workers and the environment. If ecosystems and socioeconomic groups matter, then why not the nation’s civic climate? It destabilizes society when cultural titans needlessly alienate a large swath of fellow citizens. Nike’s branding has got it backwards. It’s cheap to fire up one’s tribal base by being against something. The true moral leadership that our deeply divided society needs risks disappointing that base for the sake of the common good. It’s past time that America’s commentators, celebrities, and corporate leaders take that risk. It won’t cost everything. Lewis Waha holds an M.A. in Christian Apologetics from Biola University and is a freelance writer focusing on faith in the public square. Summer is Here!
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