Our grandparents and great-grandparents knew the value of the goods they used and the food they ate. Very often they produced one or the other or even both. So they knew the foolhardiness of waste and superfluous production. They knew the value of money because without hard physical work, they wouldn’t have any. They knew to conserve what they had and to put away for the lean years and emergencies. And they knew that to help their children and grandchildren, they themselves needed to make sacrifices; and this they did out of love.
But it’s tough to grow a country and have a powerful military if people are too focused on living conservatively and producing only what is needed. With the growth of the media—newspapers and magazines, radio, television, the Internet—politicians and businesspeople found a way to entice people to consume more. If you want to remain in power or you want to rapidly increase your company’s bottom line, you must convince citizen consumers that prosperity is about to be theirs. And although they themselves do not yet have enough prosperity, they are within reach of it and if they just keep consuming more, they will get there.
But the problem was that if honorable people who had always lived conservatively and close to the land saw the destruction of that land or of natural resources and the utter neglect of human rights, they might ask difficult questions. They would ask what kind of a world they were leaving for their children, what would happen to moral values, how could growth go on forever, were the farmers and workers receiving fair wages? And so it became necessary for consumers to be increasingly removed from the reality of what the true costs of their consumption was.
Consequently, mining was done in regions where people did not have the political power or financial security to ask difficult questions. Forests were cut down and cleared away for the farms, which were in turn sold and concreted over for suburban housing. Animals were born, raised, and killed in closed buildings where those who were to eat them never saw the suffering or filthy conditions the animals were subjected to. Garbage was removed and buried where citizens couldn’t see it. Potable water was made readily and inexpensively available so people wouldn’t think to ask if the seemingly endless stream would always be available. Or if everyone had enough.
Television, with its mesmerizing plethora of flashing images, became a primary tool in refocusing consumer’s attention. Viewers, now addicted to that screen, avidly watched “reality television,” which bore absolutely no resemblance to the reality of over two-thirds of the world's population who were living near those mines, factory farms, and garbage dumps.
How much of a hold does television have on us?
Nielsen Media Research reported that during the 2005-2006 television year, the average American watched television four hours and thirty-five minutes a day. That equates to 20,000 commercials a year! Anyone who has been in a room with a television turned on knows how difficult it is to not look at it. The best hope for abstaining in such a room is to face away from the screen. This of course becomes increasingly difficult as the screens are becoming as large as some walls in those rooms.
And so we have our world today, a world in which materialism has become the new “Holy Grail,” a world where people are more removed from the reality of what it takes to support their material cravings than ever before. A world in which people have become so focused on gratifying themselves, they have largely stopped asking about the costs to those they share the planet with and the planet itself, and even their own children. A world in which people are at great risk of blithely sailing through life, clueless about the havoc they are creating.
Even good people, caring people, get caught up in the living of life without thinking, without accepting the responsibility to learn how their choices impact others. Even good people can tell themselves that it's okay to indulge themselves, okay to take more than they need, okay to not think of the consequences of their decisions. Even good people can fall into the trap of telling themselves that it's okay because they deserve it.
To which a question arises—what about the others who also "deserve it"?