A friend of mine recounted her first experience with sweatshops while she was in a downtown Manhattan store: "I pulled the wrong curtain - I thought it was the bathroom." Instead, there were a dozen Asian women in a tiny room, busily knitting away.

A few weeks of lectures and one in-class film later, an issue as worn out as the fashionable jeans Gap distributes was fresh again.

When the film was over, I was temporarily blind. Readjusting to the light, it quickly became apparent that others had dozed off during the "exploitation" lecture video as well. My "made in China" T-shirt and "made in Taiwan" socks, however, felt slightly less comfortable.

The problem with sweatshops has slowly become an emotional issue, a sort of liberal litmus test, even. It's this aspect to the issue that has, in some ways, made the solutions a great distance from the people who are affected the most: the laborers. From the convenience of our desks, we discussed, with outstanding illiberality, the fate of the Asian laborer.

No one could just come out and say, "Maybe sweatshops aren't all that bad." Instead, we talked about the exploitation of people living below the poverty line in Asia, the pressure from Western consumers for cheaper labor and, of course, how our support of anti-sweatshop institutes was resolute. We are, after all, the generation of silent protests. How fitting that we could stand for something by shopping at American Apparel instead.

There is some injustice about it all, though. Nobody thinks for a moment that $2 a day on nine-hour-a-day, six-days-a-week, contract is fair. I mean, how could it be? While we line up to an all-you-can-eat cafeteria or walk down the aisles of "giveaway" prices at Wal-Mart, it hardly seems enough to sustain our budgeted existence - let alone a large Thai family.

And it's not just the pay - the conditions are horrid. Child laborers housed in firetraps and doused in dangerous chemicals dismissal of union-mongers and all-around brutal management are akin to the scenes described by Charles Dickens in "Hard Times" - far from the modernity of the 21st century.

In any case, our emotional outrage becomes warranted. The sweatshop laborer needs protection, redemption; maybe even deliverance.

We are saviors, we in the West. When Africans were living in tribal communities, unaware of private property, taxation and Christianity, we came forth, bearing the beacon of salvation - and shiny muskets.

When the Middle East was tearing itself apart, we sent the entire diplomatic and military prowess necessary to make matters better for us - ideally anyway.

The Western perspective is one of absolute equality and sameness. Democracy for all, affluence for all. Naturally, we must be involved in the solution to the problem of sweatshops, but it must be a solution that agrees with this modern panorama.

So what if the sweatshop factory closes down? And what of the entire community it sustained? In this global community, we want to believe our external actions can fix a problem that has been internalized for decades. We want to believe our difference is a righteous difference. So we divest, we point fingers at the lack of governance - we are better because our path leads to affluence.

The fact of the matter, however, remains the lack of alternatives. The more we divest in sweatshops, the further we end up driving the poorest Asians into abysmal poverty. The options for an uneducated woman from a rural Asian town are slim and slimmer still without this kind of labor.

Perhaps knowing about sweatshops is the real problem. Knowing the conditions, we would rather participate in ending something we're aware of than embrace the idea that our divestment could lead the sweatshop laborer down a road we know very little about.

The women in the video laughed at the idea that working seven days a week was abusive. They cherished the chance to earn more money. It means they can afford some medical care, perhaps educate their siblings. All justifications for preventing this opportunity seem so distant from the real solution.

The pressure shouldn't be on companies to dissociate from sweatshops - the pressure should be on the governments that house these institutions. We want people to be treated better, to get a chance to be educated, to get access to some semblance of primary health care. This, obviously, transcends sweatshops, so perhaps the only real solution is buying that Nike sneaker and hoping that the sweatshop worker who made it can, eventually, break the poverty cycle.

- Eli Berhane is a junior in biochemistry.