Too Much Stuff

There is something fundamentally wrong with a consumer-based economy. It's not sustainable. It depletes the earth's resources, creates too much garbage, and distorts human values. We end up investing in and honoring the wrong things. Look around your house and figure out what you really need. Think about how many hours of work it took to purchase all of this stuff.

So this afternoon when I listened to an NPR story about New Orleans and how four years later, the eastern portion of the city still doesn't have a Wal-Mart, I cringed. Wal-Mart was shorthand for the lack of retail stores in this once flooded area of the city. Although many homeowners have returned, able to furnish their newly renovated homes with insurance policy proceeds, others have abandoned their destroyed homes. With the levies still not rebuilt to withstand a level 4 or 5 hurricane, private investment hasn't come back to the area either. People don't have a nearby hospital, have only one supermarket, and don't have any of the conveniences they were accustomed to before August 2005.

What do we really need? Shoes that will last more than a season. Clothes that keep us covered, that reflect some style and workmanship. Shelter that we can call home. I wonder more and more during this economic crisis whether this collapse, yes, immediately caused by derivatives and the sale of credit default swaps, isn't just the beginning of the end of capitalism. As India and China grow up and want the products that Americans used to gloat over for the whole world to envy, where will we get the energy and the materials to satisfy their needs? Is turning "green" a way to try to protect ourselves from developing countries by changing the rules just as they are about to be able to afford our follies? Since when is Exxon a green company? Green is about quantity, too.