Boycotts, Dawn Detergent, and the Devil

I’m not a boycotter of anything. I never have been.
I’ve never walked with a picket sign or yelled into a megaphone. (Unless you count my cheerleading days, during which I did yell quite a bit. But it was more of a “Go Team!” and never a “You suck!”
I don’t boycott businesses and their products based on religion or politics. I won’t boycott a business because they are Christian, nor will I boycott them if they aren’t. Same for whether that business is said to lean left or right.

It’s not that I don’t care about issues or don’t have strong convictions, it’s just that I know that many difficult issues aren’t always as cut and dry as we’d like them to be. Some are quite complex, as are the root structures of the opinions attached to these issues.

I’ve always been this way and it started at an early age. I blame it all on my mom.

When I was in high school, the story surfaced regarding Proctor and Gamble having an occult logo. I remember it being “a thing.” Someone had come to the conclusion that the logo represented something evil and the hoax was perpetuated in certain circles. I went to a Christian school at the time, so the story was all the buzz.

Now, my mom was a fan of Dawn dishwashing detergent. It always sat on our sink. She swore by it. The night I heard the story, I went into the kitchen to share it with my mom, who happened to be washing dishes at the time.

“Hey, mom,” I said. “You know a story came out that Proctor and Gamble is a company that glorifies the occult? Their logo is said to form a pentagram and is considered satanic.”

My mom, her arms elbow deep in the sink, stopped scrubbing the lasagna pan, turned to look at me and said in her no-nonsense way, “Honey, I don’t care if the devil himself makes it; if it gets out grease, I’m using it.”

And there you have it. xoxo