The JOY of Being Barefoot by Joseph West

Shared with permission in its entirety. This was a paper written by a CU Denver student for a Communication, Citizenship and Social Justice class and sent to Dr. Jeff with a note of thanks. The emotional roller coaster that Mr. West felt touched me most because I realized that while he voluntarily chose to go barefoot, and be different, and those around him accepted what he was doing once it was explained, children of the sex trafficking trade do not receive that luxury. Ever. Their shame is forced upon them, and never-ending.

CO Gives Day just ended, but the need never stops. If you can donate to JOY International, please consider doing so.

He is having a Ribbon Cutting for his new office and hosting a Chamber Mixer next Tuesday December 16th if you'd like to come and learn more from Dr. Jeff himself.

Without further ado, the paper.

The JOY of Being Barefoot
Joseph West
University of Colorado Denver

The JOY of Being Barefoot

From Wednesday night, November 19th to Thanksgiving day, November 27th, I wore no shoes and no socks. Inspired by Dr. Jeff Brodsky, founder of JOY International™, I decided to go barefoot for 168 hours in order to better understand my own citizenship and the plight of the millions of children around the world living in abject poverty and being sold into sex slavery. The thesis of this project is one of Stephen Hartnett’s theses in You are Fit for Something Better, which states that “activists can gain strength from trusting in the mysterious logic of multiplier effects, which teaches us that even the smallest local actions can be important, frequently in ways we cannot imagine beforehand” (2007, p. 211). Though going barefoot for a week did not immediately save any girls out of the sex trade, utilizing my citizenship to do one action could potentially cause others to also join the movement, which could continually have greater impact in the future.

I experienced much greater difficulty being barefoot than I expected. When I arrived on campus the first day, I suddenly did not want to get out of the car. The reality of what I had gotten into created panic. However, I had brought no shoes, so I had no choice but to proceed with the plan. Once I finally decided to get out of the car, I had a grueling 10 minute walk from the Walnut parking lot to the Tivoli Student Union Building. The low temperature that day was 23 degrees and there was ice on the ground. My feet went numb almost as soon as they hit the blacktop. I did okay until I arrived at 7th and Walnut where I had to wait for the light to change, and after that it was a different story.

Waiting at the light made my feet much colder than before and I thought I might get frostbite. I kept walking when I realized I was right about halfway between my car and the Tivoli and I panicked as could not turn back but also did not think I could make it to the building. I thought my toes would snap off and could tell my feet were scraping along the ground but couldn’t really feel them touch the asphalt.

Mercifully, I made it inside the Tivoli, my feet burning from the cold. Suddenly a new set of awful emotions washed over me as I felt like everyone could see my feet and would think I was stupid. As I sat in the food court I wrote down my thoughts:
I’m sitting in the food court feeling like a moron. I feel completely naked and totally exposed. I’m afraid some security person or some authority is going to get mad at me and kick me out of school. I feel like my classmates will think I’m and idiot. And I’m not sure this is going to make any kind of difference.... It’s been two hours and I want to quit already.

I don’t remember a time when I wanted to quit a project more. Once again I felt like I could neither turn back nor make it to the finish. Yet in this emotional time, I had several realizations that gave profound meaning to what I was doing.

For the first time in my life I desperately wanted to be like everyone else, but was physically unable to. Everyone around me had shoes, and I was the only person who didn’t. There was nothing I could do to change this. Even the homeless people I drove by on the way to school had shoes. I had a undesirable characteristic that I could not hide and I could not change. Is this how molested and prostituted children feel as they try to deal with the horrible circumstances of their past and present? Is this how people with disabilities feel everyday as all their vulnerabilities are on display? Is this how discrimination feels? It was jarring, terrifying, and altogether unforgettable. It was amazing to me how something as simple as not wearing shoes in public could bring such shame and feeling of being exposed. Even as I recall these memories I can feel traces of those emotions.

Though these feelings were intense at the beginning of my project, they decreased as the day progressed. Yet every time I got up and moved to a different building or chair, I felt like the world was watching and be ready to explain my bare feet. People no longer saw Joe West, they only saw a person who had no shoes. However, as I began talking to classmates about what I was doing and why I was doing it, I began feeling much more confident in my project and its purpose. My thoughts at noon that day were much different than they had been in the morning:
I feel like the worst is already over. Being able to talk to people about JOY International™ is really great! It’s a super easy conversation starter and people just have to ask why I have no shoes. Seems like a great way to get the word out to me! I’m wondering how many people I could reach if I did this for more than a week... My feet kinda hurt, the cement creates a lot of friction and my feet feel real roughed up already. At least the sun came out and warmed up the pavement so my feet don’t get frostbitten!

I found that once my peers understood my cause, they highly approved of it and believed it to be a worthy project and an inspirational action. This reaction of my classmates is supported by research as reported in Generation Nice, which describes how corporations target my generation’s inclination to support organizations and companies that are involved in social justice: “The do-goodish pitch is aimed squarely at millennials, who collectively favor companies that embrace the values of good citizenship” (Tanenhaus, 2014). The trend in supporting non-profits is a well-known trait in my generation and is evidenced in the ‘slacktivism’ phenomenon created by social media. Thus, I was not altogether surprised that my classmates supported my cause. Being involved in something is cool nowadays.

My interesting experiences continued throughout the week. After internally celebrating surviving school, my first day ended in bitter discouragement as I was not allowed to enter any grocery establishment to buy food. I spent well over an hour on the phone calling places like Walmart, King Soopers, Target and Whole Foods in a fruitless attempt to be granted access to shop. All of them gave me the exact same stock answers that being barefoot is a liability, I might step on glass, negative perception of customers, and that it is a health violation. Even after explaining there is no code by any health and safety administration of any of the 50 states of America requiring footwear (Lucas, 1998), I was told (quite rudely) by each manager I could not enter their store. I ended my first day feeling rejected and unwanted. Again I experienced something close to discrimination. People wanted nothing to do with me because of a physical attribute I could not change.

The strong feelings returned in the morning and I wished I had committed to a 24 hour goal instead of an entire week. I could not go to my Bible study that morning because once again I “might step on glass” at Atlanta Bread Company. I finally changed my strategy. I would not make phone calls to businesses any longer. That day I successfully went to the bank, bought dog food at Petco, and purchased an ugly sweater at the thrift store for a Christmas party later that day. Later in the week, I also succeeded in having lunch with a friend at Village Inn and met another friend at Starbucks (I did make a call before going to Starbucks. Quite to my surprise, the manager loved what I was doing and left a note for the morning crew to know I was coming!). Most of my anxiety about being barefoot went away as I continued to have conversations with friends, family, acquaintances and perfect strangers about what my cause. I referred everyone I spoke with to JOY International™'s website, www.joy.org . I even spoke with a lady at the gas station about child sex trafficking. I began to see what a truly powerful platform my bare feet were.

Going barefoot was not my idea. JOY International™’s founder, Dr. Jeff Brodsky, has been barefoot for over four years and will most likely be barefoot until his death. However, Dr. Jeff did not start out saving children. As a Messianic Jew, he believes the Bible to be God’s word and takes seriously its commission to serve “the least of these”, or the lowest people in society. He traveled the world as “Snuggles the Love Clown”, spreading the Gospel through a performance without words. He went to leper colonies and places of extreme poverty in order to find the most down-trodden people in the world. He was stopped in his tracks when he learned about children who were being held in captivity and forced to have sex with high-paying customers. He had found the “least of these”. He began getting involved in helping girls who had been sex slaves around the world (joy.org, n.d.).

Then after seeing children living without shoes in a garbage dump in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Dr. Jeff felt God telling him to go barefoot for a year. He listened and spent the entire year that followed without shoes or socks. When the year was up, he was unable to put his socks back on as he heard God telling him that those children were still out there and his mission was not over. He then told his wife, “...if during the next year my being totally barefoot motivates even one person to action and it helps to rescue just one more child; I’ll go barefoot the rest of my life” (Brodsky, n.d.).

JOY International™ is on the frontlines of the fight to save children out of sex slavery. They work with organizations around the world to “coordinate the rescue, restoration, reintegration, and prevention of the commercial sexual exploitation of children...” (joy.org, n.d.). Dr. Jeff travels the world barefoot, speaking against this great injustice, raising money to fund their work, and has also gone on undercover missions to rescue girls out of brothels. He has dedicated everything to fighting child sex slavery and will spend the rest of his life to obtain the freedom of just one more girl. He says in his presentations that focusing on the enormity of the problem is debilitating and gets you nowhere, but rather we must adopt the attitude of the small boy from the story of the starfish – “It mattered to that one”.

Dr. Jeff exemplifies my definition of citizenship. I define American citizenship as having the opportunity to change the world. How we use that opportunity tells us if we are practicing our citizenship. Being an American citizen is unlike citizenship in any other country in the world. Our constitution gives us the chance to live a life of freedom and influence, if we choose to use our rights and privileges to make a difference. As American citizens, we truly have the chance to live out our dreams and help others who are in bondage and captivity. Dr. Martin Luther King well understood the importance of deciding to take action and truly act out citizenship. His complaint was not with people who opposed his cause, it was with those who apathetically agreed with his cause and did nothing about it. He wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, “Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection” (1963, p. 3).

From one perspective, it might seem like I did very little to help save girls out of sex slavery. But through my experience, I have put Hartnett’s thesis of the logic of multiplier effects. According to this thesis, my actions have the potential of much greater impact as the people I spoke to read about JOY International™, donate to the cause, tell others about child sex slavery, or choose to get involved in some other way. My efforts have achieved their goal if they spark one person to action. One example of this multiplier effect that I observed during my experience was when I went to my church barefoot. The pastor, knowing of my project, mentioned what I was doing in his message during both services that day. This alone carried the message to over 1,000 people!

In conclusion, I will consider my experience in the context of our class as a whole. This semester, we have considered the concept of citizenship from many different perspectives and viewpoints. Through learning about historical movements involving social justice and civil disobedience such as the founding of America, the Civil Rights movement, and Vietnam, we have explored what it means to be an American citizen. We then considered how we can use our citizenship to bring about social justice through activism. Supporting and raising awareness for JOY International™ by being barefoot for a week is activism in practice. As I lived for a week without shoes or socks, I had an incredible amount of conversations with people about JOY International™.

As a Christian, being an American citizen gives me the opportunity to better fulfill my mission of spreading the Gospel and loving the “least of these” just like Dr. Jeff. I am incredibly well resourced, I have all I need for survival, I live away from war, I have access to higher education, and I can travel almost anywhere as an American citizen. Through this class, I have become more grateful of all the privileges and opportunities to become a difference-maker that I have simply because I am an American citizen.


References
Brodsky, J. (n.d.) Why is our founder barefoot? Retrieved from www.joy.org/barefoot.html
Harnett, S.J. (2007). You are fit for something better: Communicating hope in antiwar activism . In L. R. Frey & K. M. Carragee (Eds.), Communication activism: Vol. 1. Communication for social change (195 – 246 ). Cresskill , NJ : Hampton.
JOY International™ (n.d.). History of JOY International. Retrieved from www.joy.org/index2.html
King, Jr., M. L., (1963). Letter from Birmingham jail. The Negro is Your Brother, 212(2), 78-88.
Lucas, P. J. (1998). Bare feet in establishments. Retrieved from www.barefooters.org/index_2013_img2.html
Tanenhaus, S. (2014, August 17). Generation nice. The New York Times. pp. ST1.