Consumerism: An American Cancer

From http://www.verdant.net

Imagine yourself dwelling in the following world:


You live in a safe pleasant and unpolluted community where you actually know your neighbors and interact with them, be it a small town, a suburb or even a city neighborhood. You can easily walk, bicycle or take effective mass transit to your nearby job, giving you time to think or read as you get there.


The work that you do improves our future, benefits your community and means something to you and those with whom you interact. You actually look forward to Monday. The longer that you are employed the more you learn and the more valuable you become to your employer with an increasing level of pay.


Your work schedule leaves you sufficient time to enjoy your friends, family and outside interests. Money isn’t a controlling influence in your life because your needs are easily met. Your possessions are few, yet of high quality, thus allowing your home to be small, neat and inexpensive to own or rent.


You’re connected to your surroundings, rather than just dwelling in them, your backyard, for example, provides most of the produce you might need plus a surplus that you can trade with neighbors. You have a stake in your community and participate in local decision making at the Town Council, P.T.A. and other grass roots organizations.. You buy what is necessary in nearby establishments whose owners are known to you and live in your community. If you have children, they walk to a nearby well-funded neighborhood school in safety and then learn authentic social skills as they interact with a community of honorably employed adults when away from school.


Occasionally you need to travel to a large store on the edge of town. You do this on a free shuttle bus or perhaps in a simple, older vehicle, the use and costs of which you might share with others or a car that you rent only when you need it, thus preserving for yourself the weeks or months that it takes to earn the thousands of after-tax Dollars that owning a new car would take away from you each year. Your interests, the things that you really like to do with your mind and your hands, all the possibilities of your life, are there to be explored because you have the time, energy and money to do so.


“But this is America, you say, all this is possible.”


“Not anymore it’s not”.


(Editor’s note: that was first written in the 1990s when this page was posted.


You know what’s happened to the economy and our country since then)


There are growing forces making this way of life almost impossible to attain or maintain, even for the wealthy. If you are among the lucky few who still have the kind of life outlined above, these same forces threaten you. Whether you live in an isolated small town or prefer your anonymity as well as the multiplicity of things available to you in a big city, these same forces will are eroding your security and ability to make choices for yourself.

Do you think what’s outlined at the beginning of this page can only occur in some mythic long-past small town? Before the hegemony of consumerism and bottom-line Wall Street economics, you could do all of these things anywhere, including in our cities. There is no reason that we cannot live like this again if sufficient people work to identify and disempower the forces that promote and profit from limiting our social and economic horizons.


These forces are manifested in our lives as consumerism. People voluntarily hand over their soverignty as Americans and citizens in exchange for things and conveniences that sap and paralyze our ability to fight the forces that are weakening our real economy and our ability to affect change in it.

The process began innocently enough. At first they were a growing number of pleasant conveniences for housewives in the 1950s, then a car for everyone with the gradual and inevitable erosion of mass transit, then the ubiquitousness of things and chemical products technologically unimaginable a few decades earlier.


With this came a growing a availability of consumer credit and debt to make things available, the over-dependence on labor-saving devices, total dependence on the car and absolute necessity of full time work, the two income household to pay for more and more, then the importation of cheaper and cheaper goods and the disappearance of manufacturing jobs, the commodification of labor and the discarding of loyalties to our citizens and taxpayers and now the decline of service work with professionals next to be downsized….The ongoing disenfranchisement of people from our own community, replaced by commercial transactions with distant strangers…where will it end? When America looks like some faded Third World fragment of the old British Empire? An overpopulated wasteland of pollution, eroded landscapes, worn out infrastructure and hungry people digging into landfills for salvageables? With real unemployment above 20% and manufacturing being outsourced at new levels, this vision is looking more and more tangible. The Middle Class is dying.


We shouldn’t allow this to happen. Things may be starting to turn around in our favor. But it takes work and time and attention to details and a willingness to try new things for our own and our children’s benefit. There are serious changes ahead. We can control some of these for our benefit or we can just react to them after they have happened–or worse yet, ignore the changes and pretend that they do not matter.


Simply stated, there is a lot of money being made and a lot of power being gathered by the people that promote consumerism. You pay for it in gradually limited economic mobility, pollution, threats to your health and a declining standard of living, as measured by the things that really matter….

This is what this site is about, identifying these forces and showcasing opportunities to lessen or eliminate their control over your life through the completion of everyday things, that in the aggregate, fight the big battles. We’re not suggesting that you pick up guns and start blasting away. What we advocate does far more damage than bullets to these forces and the people behind them and makes life much more enjoyable for you while it returns to you the possibility of living the way that you choose. We cannot rely on politicians because if they have any true power they have been bought and paid for and if they haven’t been bought and paid for they probably don’t have any real power. (with a few notable local exceptions).

Consumerism is economically manifested in the chronic purchasing of new goods and services, with little attention to their true need, durability, product origin or the environmental consequences of manufacture and disposal. Consumerism is driven by huge sums spent on advertising designed to create both a desire to follow trends, and the resultant personal self-reward system based on acquisition. Materialism is one of the end results of consumerism.


Consumerism interferes with the workings of society by replacing the normal common-sense desire for an adequate supply of life’s necessities, community life, a stable family and healthy relationships with an artificial ongoing and insatiable quest for things and the money to buy them with little regard for the true utility of what is bought. An intended consequence of this, promoted by those who profit from consumerism, is to accelerate the discarding of the old, either because of lack of durability or a change in fashion.