Years are fleeting and distractions are numerous. Commerce is persuasive. Debilitating chemical dependencies have become easily obtained in the form of casual prescription or performance drinks. School and work are lengthy and taxing. Recreation is spent in the clamor of competition. Food is neither satisfying nor nourishing. Inflation doesn’t sleep. Entertainment is escapist. Peers apply the pressure of beauty myth. The pace of fashion leaves us contemptibly clothed within a single season. Real estate ‘values’ escalate while our ability to maintain a dwelling dwindles. Deadlines are a parched driving rain. Traffic is enraging, routine exhausting.
We know that we are vulnerable; fleshy bags of blood and plasma mounted on a fracture susceptible skeleton, the whole encased in semi-permeable film offering little resistance to puncture or to chemical and radioactive destroyers, wired with dendrites and dreams, pulsating with passions, aspiring to cosmic significance, on a determinate course toward dissolution. We are easy prey.
“Can I keep up?” is easily answered with a dose of commercials served up within an hour of television. “You lack energy, you lack “drive”, you’re balding, you’re fat, you don’t sleep well, your hair is the wrong color, your lips are too thin, you’re hairy in the wrong places. Your life is boring, hassled and mediocre. You’re a lousy parent. You need a vacation and a prescription.” To heed this council is to cultivate clinical depression; to ignore it is to be out of fashion, out of touch. Styles come and styles go, fashion keeps us shopping. Commerce leaves everyone in its wake contemptible and scrambling to acquire.
Advertising is more cunning still. Ads for housing display happy families or children, but omit the house. Pills promise relief. Male enhancement products taut satisfied wives. Insurance proffers security. Investments intone satisfying leisure. What is this bill of goods? Can it be delivered or are we victim and accomplice to fraudulent scheming? These are not things, but emotions. This is nothing but false advertising! There can be no delivery.
But we are working and we are spending. We are spending big, sacrificing our lives and making some very rich, in the hopes of enjoying a few trickle down crumbs of privilege pie. We are entirely engaged in keeping up, distracted from more enduring endeavors. We are paying the tab and the goods are not being delivered, even when the stuff is. It will never be sufficient, even when supplied in excess.
We are both victim and perpetrator in a mental framework that excuses what the market will bear. We are burning up our atmosphere, setting up great weather related devastations, filling our earth with plastic, turning a blind eye to the growing economic disparity of our own society and basically frittering away our resources and lives playing out an attitude of compulsory servitude. Why? Are the options really so limited? Is this a problem of perception or imagination?
Green solutions in health, in foods and in general have begun to emerge. Though they are the same ilk of typical commercialism; elitist self-congratulatory pricey green advice directed toward the over privileged; such as how to remodel your home with “green materials”, meanwhile, dumping all sorts of perfectly fine, though no longer fashionable materials into the landfill. Succumbing to commercial and social pressure to buy a ‘greener car’, still puts a whole new vehicle into circulation, replete with newly mined and minted resources. ‘Natural beauty care’ comes in plastic containers, containing ingredients that sound suspiciously chemical. ‘Natural foods’ are often so processed that they are downright industrial, swathed in layers of plastic packaging, they have traveled every bit as far as their counterpart self-indulgent industrial convenience foods.
Can we rely on free market forces to adapt? We have accepted the label ‘consumer’ and allowed vested interests to advise us in every aspect of life. We as a society are commercially educated. Any research or solution funded by commercial interests is most certainly tainted by profit motive. But that doesn’t keep them from caching in on such research. Products have washed their packaging in green advertising, but very little change has been realized. Companies boast thinking outside the box, but cannot think against their own interest of profits: Social behaviors that contribute to pollution, global warming, disposable society, mounting waste, to disease and war continue to be very profitable. The very survival of corporations is imbedded in perpetuating our self-destructive behaviors. We would be daft to look to commerce for real solutions.
We can’t hope for government to fix this problem! A politician’s only concern is re-election funds provided by “interests”(ie. companies willing to donate to campaigns in exchange for legislative favoritism and privileges) and taxable expenditures. Which puts our survival back into the hands of the corporations and into their pocket alongside the politicians.
The problem is that real solutions aren’t all that glamorous. Hence, they just aren’t marketable or profitable: Quit driving so much, prepare your own food, eat simply, shop locally, buy in bulk, buy less stuff- for God’s sake, avoid the pitch and toss of fashion, live in a smaller house, dress for the season instead of relying so on central air, reduce the water you run down the drain, grow some food and plant anything but grass! Such advice smacks of deprivation.
In truth it is liberating! Using my hands and creativity to prepare food is to embrace the sensual life. Home is a sanctuary from the pervasive message of inadequacy and need for relentless scheduling. Just having less money can be a refuge from commercialism, when I am of the right mind. When dressing for the season, old clothes become new and heighten awareness of weather’s small pleasures; the tingle of radiant sun at the end of a glum winter or a cool breeze of evening couched in a relentless summer. Living in a smaller house leaves me less to clean. Simple alterations to clothes can amplify style or reinvigorate worn ones without leaving me at the recent whim of designers. Oh and growing food… there is no limit to the satisfaction of harvesting even a single zucchini. It begs me to pause and wonder at the skies and soil and endless bounty, the benevolence of the marvelously wrought universe replicating eternally within the very marrow of a vegetable. Freely given it is gratefully received.
Today, this moment, I stand my ground, raise my fist and declare my sovereignty.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
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