Happy Holidays!

In light of all the holiday shopping commercials on TV these days, I’ve been thinking a lot about how although we all have way too much stuff already, our yearning to buy more and more never ceases. But very few of us wonder where all this stuff we buy comes from, where it will go when we’ve decided we no longer want it, and the effects that our stuff will have on the environment and other people all along the way. And even those of us who do wonder might have a hard time resisting the temptation to buy all that shiny new stuff anyway. Even though the ads on TV encouraging us to keep buying disgust me, I still have a hard time resisting the urge to participate, as after all, its what I’ve always done.

Right now we enjoy a lengthy disconnection from the environmental and societal effects of our stuff, but will it always be this way? As globalization spreads our economic system and our material values, and more and more people can and want to live the way we do, where will we hide our the externalized costs of all our stuff? We’ll have fewer and fewer places to export our pollution and to exploit cheap labor. Without an excess of cheap crap lining the walls of every Target and every Wal-mart, What’s going to happen to Christmas!!!

I suppose my dilemma is this- how does one accept the fact that she will never live fully ethically in such a society? I know that my actions are having effects on the environment and other people, but there’s not really anything I can do but minimize such effects by being a “responsible” consumer- drive less, buy less stuff, buy ethically-produced foods, be politically active, etc. I’ll admit, it’s not really that hard to accept. Because I don’t fully blame myself, I blame the system. And that’s what most everyone does. And “everyone” is getting a whole lot bigger. We’re all headed to the edge of a cliff, and no one can really do anything about it. But its ok for us, because we’ll never feel the effects, our children might, but probably not that badly. People in the global south feel the effects of our addiction to stuff every day, and it will be even worse for their children, but we’ll never meet them.  We have the luxury of being able to choose to care or not to care, and it’s so hard to keep caring in a system that hides its negative aspects halfway across the planet. In a world that’s so connected its become disconnected, how do we not forget to care?

Posted by Mollie Tarte