Gadgets and Gang Rape

Your connection with the war

By Leah Garvin

The sale of cell phones reached more than 1 billion in 2007. One year later, the United Nations declared the Democratic Republic of Congo the most dangerous place in the world to be a woman or a girl.

In the next 24 hours, we need to ask Congress to support critical language requiring conflict minerals accountability to be part of the financial reform legislation.

What does "conflict minerals accountability" mean for you?

It means that your cell phone, your laptop, and your gaming system currently connect you to the deadliest conflict since WWII – the war over minerals in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

A few months ago, NYTimes op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof ran a series of editorials about the devastation in the region. Post-Haiti earthquake, as millions of dollars and countless hours of coverage dominated our “care radar,” Kristof asked us why we don’t care about a humanitarian conflict that has killed 30 times as many as the quake did.

“Sometimes I wish eastern Congo could suffer an earthquake or a tsunami, so that it might finally get the attention it needs,” Kristof remarked.

By the end of his article, I was crying for the children who were forced to witness the gang rape of their mother, the gruesome murder of their father, and suffer unrelenting pain from sexual violence and abandonment.

What I learned next inspired me to advocate for conflict-free minerals.

The Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the most mineral-rich regions in the world. Armed groups trade an estimated $200 million a year of the 3T’s+Gold – tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold. Our electronics would not function without these minerals. Tantalum stores electricity; tungsten makes your phone vibrate; tin is used as solder for the circuit board, and gold coats the wiring.

You do not have to be a doctor, a scientist or a millionaire to help end this war. As consumers of electronics, we have a direct influence on the circulation of conflict minerals.

John Prendergast, the founder of the Enough Project, points out, “there are few other conflicts in the world where the link between our consumer appetites and mass human suffering is so direct.”

The Enough Project is a nonprofit initiative working to prevent genocide and violence against humanity and is the leader of the conflict free minerals campaign Raise Hope for Congo.

There are dozens of rebel militias from the Congo, including the national police force, and from neighboring Brundi, and Hutu’s from Rwanda that have chosen rape as a military tactic to assert control over natural resources. Generose, a Congolese rape survivor recalls the militias’ grotesque violence against her family (video):

We had six children at home so the [militia] cut my leg into six pieces to give to the children to eat. But my son said, "I can't eat a part of my mother." So they killed my child. He was eight years old.

An unmonitored supply chain connects you to millions like Generose.

Armed groups profit millions of dollars every year from smuggling the minerals out of the country into neighboring Rwanda, Brundi, Uganda and eventually to the coast. One million dollars worth of tantalum (coltan) is exported from Brundi everyday – that is $365 million that should be energizing the DRC’s economy every year.

The minerals change hands from middlemen, to Asian distributors, to smelting factories. Then they are used to make components that make our cell phones, laptops, iPods, and gaming systems operate.

These same electronics that connect you to these Congolese can be your tools for change.

Gen Y is the number-one consumer of electronics. Transparency in the consumer electronics supply chain is the most effective way to ensure conflict free gadgets and the end of funding violence in the DRC. As a consumer, and a constituent, you can demand conflict free electronics. Write and Facebook your representatives to tell them that Gen Y supports conflict free resolutions. Yes, they listen.

Take action today on Facebook. Within the next 24 hours, Congress will vote on critical language requiring conflict minerals accountability to be part of the financial reform legislation. Despite bi-partisan support of the language and backing by tech companies, manufacturing and retail industry groups are lobbying to have it removed.

Please take five minutes to Facebook two key members of Congress, Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and Senator Bob Corker (R-TN), to ask them to please ensure that conflict minerals language stays in the legislation. Click herefor more information and a sample script of what to say.

Talk about it. Your friends care about your opinion. A Harvard study found people are most influenced by their friends and family, above celebrities and advertisements. Find your talking point.

Live it. Pledge your commitment to purchase conflict free cell phones and laptops.

This post originally appeared on The Next Great Generation.

Millennials: Walking contradictions

This post was originally published on The Next Great Generation.

With the economy in a downward spiral and three (and counting) graduating classes now on the job hunt, Gen Y kids’ personalities are becoming the focal point of discussion and analysis. We’re stock full of both anxiety and self-confidence, but how do we balance those two opposite and overwhelming feelings to parlay them into success?

Harvard’s Institute of Politics recently released the 2009 edition of their annual Survey of Young Americans, which began in 2000.

The statistics are alarming.

“Sixty-percent of Millennials are concerned about their ability to meet their current bills and financial obligations and 59 percent are worried about being able to afford a place to live. Almost half of those who are currently in the workplace are afraid that they’ll lose their job, and this fear is echoed in college students’ anxiety about their future after graduation – 84 percent indicated that finding a job will be ‘very difficult.’ Students are also worried about their ability to keep paying for college, with 45 percent of four-year college students and 64 percent of community colleges expressing concern about staying in school.”

What this means is that we’re constantly racked with anxiety about what we’re doing, how we’re doing, and when the other shoe will drop.

It’s true. I am often anxious, worried about not having something done on time, or feeling that really, really bad feeling in my stomach that leads me to believe that I have forgotten something. And I know I’m not alone.

Oddly, however, one of the most consistent qualities that are associated with Millennials is self-confidence.

Also known by some as the Trophy Kids because we grew up in an age when everyone in Little League won a trophy for participating, we feel like we can do anything well and we’ll be rewarded for it.

We were told that we could do whatever we wanted to do and be whatever we wanted to be and we still feel that way. We are multifaceted experts, living in a world where an accountant can have a successful YouTube show or a cubicle-dweller can make more money from a blog about anime than making Excel spreadsheets. And we’re positive that we too will arrive some day.

But if it’s true that Millennials have unprecedented confidence in themselves and the world around them, why has the rate of college students being diagnosed with depression increased 56 percent in the last six years? What are we so upset about, if we have so much confidence in our abilities?

A recent New York Times Magazine article about this gross over-confidence, saying that the gross over-confidence exhibited by Millennials was “a result, as some longtime observers of this generation have suggested, of growing up in an era of almost unremitting ambient anxiety: school years spent in the shadow of Columbine, 9/11 and, lately, widespread parental job losses. Maybe chronic unease has simply raised this generation’s tolerance level for stress, leaving it uniquely well equipped to deal with uncertainty.”

Truly, it doesn’t matter why we’re stressed, uncertain, and weirdly sure of ourselves all at the same time.

We are a generation of multi-taskers. We can talk, type, text and watch all at once and it’s about time our emotions kept up.

It is possible for me to be completely confident in my beliefs, as I wage a verbal war at Fox News, yelling at the TV at the same time that I feel very, very anxious about my job, how I’m going feed myself this week, or if my parents think I’m doing a good job.

What we need to focus on is making sure that the crippling anxiety and the over-confidence are balanced and equal – just to the point that while we’re sure we can finish that project and get an A, or do well on an assignment, we have a healthy dose of fear to push us into honestly doing our best work.

That way, when we do get rewarded for doing well, we know we earned it.