Watching football replays last night - NBC now carries Premiere League matches – and as I was watching Manchester United thump Hull (they were relegated, sad face) with half an eye, I was suddenly struck by the ads unspooling before me.
Off-road vehicles: the top of the line model comes with a free winch!
Motor sports: can you say "pointless waste of fossil fuel?
Riding lawn mowers: for suburban home lawns, not golf courses.
Huge, nearly industrial scale air conditioning units for the home: marketed by pushing the concept of personal comfort above all.
Luxury cars: immense heavy resource-gulping CO2-emitting monsters that by all rights ought to have gone the way of the dodos decades ago, but that have somehow crept back into the market and are shamelessly touted with no reference to their gas mileage - just by pandering to the apparently endless human need to feel like a member of the pampered leisure class.
Appliances: giant gleaming brushed steel monstrosities that grow larger and larger and larger every year, and clearly are no longer being replaced when they wear out, but rather when they are no longer "on trend" and don't fit in with the decor.
And lately on every channel I've been agog at all of the stuff we Americans consume that we simply do not need - that guzzle gas - that waste resources and that the production and distribution of which pollute and lay waste to our environment.
It was a thunderclap moment. Of course I know that we live in a consumer society and that the levers of power are applied in large part to keep us compliantly consuming, shoveling our hard earned $7.25 an hour into the corporate maw. I’ve known that practically forever. So the sudden she sinking feeling is not that any of this exists, but that all of it - the whole pleasure-principal driven, self-indulgent, mindless, wasteful, selfish consumer culture that surrounds and enfolds us and strangles us in its endlessly inventive tentacles - occupies a space so far below our conscious "this is bad for the environment" radar screen that it will ultimately prove impossible to get people to wake up and realize that WE DON'T NEED THIS STUFF. Or to make people even realize that there is a decision to be made about what our priorities are, and what stuff we need, and what stuff we don’t, and what we can eschew if we make the decision to do so.
If we don’t even ask the question, or have a conversation about the production and consumption and powering and disposal of it and how we can change the game IF WE KNOW WE MUST, then we’re stuck. And that, in a nutshell, was the sinking feeling.