Consumerism allows people to create the illusion of giving without having to sacrifice anything personal. Buying loads of useless or unneeded crap, wrapping it up in mountains of toxic paper and ribbon, presenting it, often by mail, to recipients we rarely see seems a requirement for anyone who isn’t Scrooge.
Let's try something new. Give presence this holiday season. Give time and attention, spend creative energy, become less fractured and manic, more unified and peaceful. Refuse to spend your useless gift quota ($450,000,000,000 spent each year in the U.S. divided by the American gift-buying population -- that's your required outlay). Donate some of the money you didn't spend to Living Water International, an organization working to provide fresh water to undeveloped countries.
A lack of clean water is the leading cause of death in under-resourced countries. 1.8 million people die annually from water-born illnesses, nearly 4,000 children every DAY. It's estimated that $10 billion would solve the world's fresh-water crisis. $10 billion. Our national priorities are beyond fucked up.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
the Advent Conspiracy
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3 comments:
Consumerism does not equal contentment. Thanks for pointing people in a better direction.
My two sons just got an ecard today from their uncle's family (my brother), saying that a donation had been made in their names to the World Wildlife Fund. It was great! The boys loved it!
I loved that video, too.... thx.
Jesus never even existed, no more than the $450B we spend. It's all on paper and nowhere else. Reality does exists though. It's in the mountains and valleys and deep into the earth itself, those vast flows of molten nickel and silica. It's also in our rivulets of blood , in our hair, our nervous system and ganglions, as well as in the minute networks of fluids found in aphids and in those trillions of bacterias under the soles of our feet. All that club of 'beings' travels with us under the stars, and all of it is infinitely more poignant than a phoney virgin Mary in a fictitious manger. So let us go out more and then let's feel each other's veinous networks, let's live and feel and gawk in wonderment. Then we will have removed the sky's blue burka and see it smile for the first time at the formidable array of miraculous things that each of us harbors, more than a two-dimensional Jesus fabricated by copycat shamans to achieve power over us.
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