The university’s step toward changing the world with the non-sweatshop clothing line HeartBeat deserves applause.

The HeartBeat line uses American Apparel Fabric, which wisely pays laborers Fair Trade compensation.

HeartBeat also cares about designs of T-shirts. It will release three designs each semester and will feature this semester the designs of Ryan Feerer (’05), Brent Couchman (’05) and Ben Hernandez (’06), all ACU alumni graphic designers.

The university will donate some of its profits to an organizat ion that needs financial support, which allows Heart- Beat and ACU to influence even more people.

Stephen’s Children, an organization that works with youth in poor urban communities in the Middle East, has been selected as the first organization HeartBeat supports.

In the future, HeartBeat will include more student input by adopting a voting system to decide which organization it wants to support with the profit. This system could raise more students’ interest and awareness in the worldwide support that HeartBeat makes possible.

The Campus Store has dealt in non-sweatshop or Fair Trade products for several years, an excellent policy. All the clothing companies that the store deals with now are Fair Trade companies.

Although the university is changing as a whole, if we want to prove that we, as individuals, care about and support Fair Trade, we should also reevaluate our own consuming habits beyond the campus.

Knowing cruelty of working environment that laborers, possibly children, were put in, should make us feel guilty for buying sweatshop products as Christians and as humans.

Sweatshop products appeal to retailers and consumers because of low prices, but we ignore the moral questions to satisfy our selfish and mindless needs.