It is time to stop pandering to the corporate behemoth that rules us. All this publicity for its orgy of glut and waste is unbelievable! The planet is hurting. The economy that hurts it is fed by consumerism. It is going to take major changes in everyone's lifestyle to begin to hope we can stave off some of the coming disaster. Yet we all act like robots talking about the feeding frenzy that fuels our doom. When will this stop? Read on below for a modest proposal.
It is easy to do this. m mEvery time y7ou are tempted to talk about the spending orgy stop and rather say something urging others to join in a massive movement to save our children and future generations. Talk about the waste and the ruin the consumer economy has created.
Talk about agriculture and the way agribusiness has hurt us. Read The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture by Wendell Berry.
Since its publication by Sierra Club Books in 1977, The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters. In it, Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural development and spiritual discipline. Today’s agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families. As a result, we as a nation are more estranged from the land—from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it.
Sadly, as Berry notes in his Afterword to this third edition, his arguments and observations are more relevant than ever. We continue to suffer loss of community, the devaluation of human work, and the destruction of nature under an economic system dedicated to the mechanistic pursuit of products and profits. Although “this book has not had the happy fate of being proved wrong,” Berry writes, there are good people working “to make something comely and enduring of our life on this earth.” Wendell Berry is one of those people, writing and working, as ever, with passion, eloquence, and conviction.
Talk about consumerism and how carefully it has been programmed into all of us..
The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man
Like his later 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy, The Mechanical Bride is unique and composed of a number of short essays that can be read in any order – what he styled the "mosaic approach" to writing a book. Each essay begins with a newspaper or magazine article or an advertisement, followed by McLuhan's analysis thereof. The analyses bear on aesthetic considerations as well as on the implications behind the imagery and text. McLuhan chose the ads and articles included in his book not only to draw attention to their symbolism and their implications for the corporate entities that created and disseminated them, but also to mull over what such advertising implies about the wider society at which it is aimed.
These warnings came some time ago. Since they appeared it has become far worse. It is insanity to go on yet we do. Think about your kids and future generations. What are we doing to them? You really do not need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.