That’s interesting… I never thought of materialistic meaning that you care more about the stuff, i just assumed that it was acquiring more and more stuff.

But they could stop putting everything on styrofoam plates at the cafeteria at our school……

They’re grad students, mind you, and I really thought that they would have a wee bit of sensitivity and knowledge on the importance of NOT using those non-biodegradable boxes, but no.

They didn’t care one bit. I felt like biting their heads off! LOL.

Plastic is a godsend for a consumer culture because it is dirt cheap, and can be tailor-made to have characteristics for any purpose, size, shape, texture, color, smoothness, hardness, pliability, weight, etc.

When I was a kid I would imagine what it might be like to have a machine that you could use to create anything you wanted. Turn it on, wait a few minutes, open the door and there would be what you desired. Plastic comes awfully close to allowing that.

Consumption as we know it is a mindless pursuit driven by psychology, not need, and limited only by cost and, recently, not even by that if the price can be put off with credit to the future. Few things even pretend to be practical in the way they are advertised. It’s all an appeal to the emotions and lifestyle…is this or that “you”? Why not buy it and see?

Reflective people can think their way out of this, but for the hungrily consuming and constantly stimulated multitude, only a crash will bring the mind back to reality. The kind of financial crash that will revive the long lost phrase, “I can’t afford it”

Of course, those of us who read this blog realize the planet can’t afford what humanity is doing, but the only way that comes through down on the ground is when there isn’t a wad of bills or a stash of credit cards in the wallet.

I think, however, you’ve identified the exact problem: most people don’t want to be aware, let alone to slow down. I realized this when, feeling particularly wise, I showed a friend a picture I found on
“Bring Your Own”. The text reads “It is pretty amazing that our society has reached a point where the effort necessary to extract oil from the ground, ship it to a refinery, turn it into plastic, shape it appropriately, truck it to a store, buy it, bring it home…

is considered to be less effort than what it takes to just wash the spoon when you’re done with it.”

Feeling a kind of enlightened-Buddha smugness, I was shocked when she said, “yeah, but sometimes it is easier.”

We may do bus ads in our municipality modeled off of the image linked to above, and I think that’ll be great, but after reading this post, I’m trying to imagine myself addressing the municipal taxpayers and saying “try to be mindful of the life cycle of the materials that surround you.” It would clearly be better than the heavy guilt trip we work on laying. Guilt breeds excuses (“since I already did x I can get away with not doing y”) or petulance (“you can’t make me”) or class privilege (“I pay my property taxes, now shut up and take my recyclable water bottles to the landfill”).

Unfortunately, my little daydream casting me as St. Patrick holding up a plastic shamrock and gently correcting the good heathens about their natural resource use ends with, not the plastic snakes driven off the island, but me (now as Joan of Arc) being burned at the stake on a toxic fire of burning plastic bottles (what will get him first, the flame or the fume?), or, if you prefer, a buff St. Sebastian pierced not with Roman arrows, but plastic sporks. Apologies to all those not raised Catholic in the 1950s or having a degree in Art History for the images.

CLM