In his recommended diary Teacherken explores the tension between reducing the usual holiday extravagance we Americans indulge, and the loss of jobs, and income, that are bound to result from this tightening. My conflict is with the growth that promoted these business extravagances in the first place.
Each of the cited businesses are the direct result of thoughtless, and uncontrolled growth by these establishments, with the attendant traffic, pollution, and feeding of the beast of consumerism, with no thought to the consequences.
Somewhere along the line we stopped making things. Somewhere along the line we stopped creating, and building, and learning, and devolved into a hoard of shoppers willing to trample a stock clerk on our way to that 32 inch flat screen bargain. And, we are constantly told that the entire economy depends on our spending every last cent and going into debt if necessary, to buy more and more stuff so we can support the growth of business.
People's jobs, peoples lives, nay, even their profits, depend on growth. So. Get out there and shop. Buy stuff. Wrap it in expensive papers brilliantly displayed is stores that exist to showcase expensive papers. Hang your house with tens of thousands of colored lights, ignoring the pollution, in a never ending competition with your neighbor's equally bad taste. Shop to keep the season jolly. After all, people's jobs, peoples lives, nay, even their profits, depend on growth in spending.
It's a clever, never ending Ponzi Scheme, just as so much of the commercial world is. We can only live if we impoverish ourselves, stock piling goods in a never ending search for "storage space". Goods that have been imported from places that still do make things. This ensures that business will pay the pittance of salary that will allow clerks, and cashiers, and stockers to purchase yet more imported stuff, encourage growth of businesses, opening new stores, and pretending that we have a viable and stable economy.
It is often postulated that there is no way to actually change the economic system we currently support. We can only modify it around the edges. Introduce regulation, exercise control through taxation and rewards to those who show good business acumen. But, is this really true?
What would happen if we just said, "No!" Not this time. Not this year. Now with my future and that of my children. I'm not going to go into debt to pile a lot of imported stuff in fancy paper, under a fake, Chinese manufactured pine. Not this year. I am not going to contribute to the pollution and waste and pretense that everything is OK.
There will be a terrible shake out. People will lose their jobs, businesses will fail, and the Asian export market might suffer a blow out in as much as we are the major outlet for the stuff they produce.
But could the result be a more carefully structured economic system? A system of making things, of hiring people with skills, of paying for good products carefully made, and total rethinking of growth, with all of its unintended consequences?
If we are really serious about saving the planet, and changing our foot print on the globe, could we consider beginning with a major reduction in spending this Christmas? Not because we must, but because we should.
Some times a cure can only be found in radical surgery...