My daughter blames me. Every time she misplaces something
like her keys, wallet, or camera, she calls to complain that she inherited her
forgetfulness from her Dad. No argument there; it’s the price we pay for our
brilliance, I remind her. Most recently, it was the stylus from her digital
drawing pad. I suggested that every lose-able little thing gets a four foot
length of avalanche cord. Avalanche cord is a lightweight and brightly colored
line that winter mountaineers drag behind them in snow-laden backcountry. If
they suffer the misfortune of burial, their avalanche cord floats up in the
fluid snow, helping searchers find them. Would a bit of avalanche cord help us
find that lost TV remote in the snowdrifts of newspapers, clothes, CD cases and
dog toys?
Oh, ‘tis the season of wonder, and I’m wondering about being
buried under our stuff. Here in the land of the free, why do we sometimes feel
chained to our material prosperity, forever lugging boxes burdened with the
fruits of consumer culture. It’s a mixed blessing. I like the freedom to haul
this amazing little computer up the hill and sit under three centuries of
slow-growth oak, looking out across the Petaluma Watershed as I write these
words. But back there in the casa, more stuff awaits to be picked up, sorted,
put away, cleaned or recycled. How much work we make for our selves,
maintaining our high stacks of stuff! From vacuuming thousands of square feet
of carpet to shuffling hundreds of holiday catalogues to forever clearing out
the garage. A simpler life calls.
The trill of a solitary bird in the branches above fades
into the distant low roar of holiday traffic, chain saws and leaf blowers. Down
there in the modern world where, according to a recent report, the media
occupies enough time to fill the first five months of the average person’s year,
every year. That media has given us a new day in the holiday season: Black
Friday, the big shopping day after Thanksgiving, where the ledger’s red ink turns
black. Eleven hours a day Mother Media is pumping up the shopping season like
the fan in that inflatable lawn Santa. When the power goes out, won’t Santa
collapse into a heap of red and white PVC? Will that be it for Christmas?
Of course not, says the popular mythology. Our culture is
rich with stories like Charlie Brown’s Christmas, where companionship and the
sharing of simple gifts are what really matters. Yet we seem strapped on this
treadmill of conspicuous consumption. Our national economy, and the livelihood
of so many people we care about, is dependent on the Christmas spending
extravaganza. I’d like to purchase less and have more free time, but what about
the jobs and families of the people making the stuff I buy, or, for that
matter, buying the stuff I make. Are we trapped?
No. I believe that we are capable – destined, perhaps – to
gracefully abandon the consumer culture before it is brutally torn from us by
resource depletion and ecological collapse. But it’s a destiny we must earn. We
need to adopt new measures of societal health; concepts like Gross National
Product (the grosser the better) and Consumer Confidence (the human as eating
machine) need a one-way trip to the dumpster. Our Christmas stories and our macroeconomic
policy need to more actively take on the materialism that impoverishes both the
soul and the planet. Let’s make material simplicity a treasured cultural
characteristic as well as moral imperative: to “live simply that
others may simply live”, as Gandhi put it. We can help each other through the withdrawal
from consumption addiction through our cultural, faith, and neighborhood
institutions, getting more comfortable with sharing stuff and helping each
other get through job transitions. And instead of buying another something that
someone doesn’t really need, adding to their avalanche, donate the time or
money you’d save to people who are truly needy. If you already do that, do it
more.
There are still five shopping days until Christmas. It’s not
too late.