It sickens me this attitude that once a year we should all be inclined to charge off to the retail outlets and purchase material goods as some display of how much we love each other. Of course nothing says I love you like a made to break, plastic fantastic, designed to be obsolete by February what-cha-ma-call with a thirty day credit on return limited warranty.
How do we punctuate all this love, this festive bullshit? Well we spend a few days like zombies, shoulder to shoulder, in lines bigger than Ben Hur, eyes glazed over and mined numbed to the point of near complete psychosis at the local mall. Looking for that perfect bit of plastic shite for each particular loved one, or perhaps the made by slaves clothing item that will be all the rave until boxing day.
It is such a joyous occasion that our brains appear to enter a state of almost complete stasis as we collect up all the cardboard, plastic and styrofoam over-packaging and trundle it off to the curb at the end of the obligatory junk exchange. Listening gleefully as our children express themselves with more kindness than we will ever hear on any number of collective days of the rest of the year. Never considering for even the slightest moment that we are teaching our children to express their love and most heartfelt consideration by buying things for people. That love is measured by the stuff you get and give, not by the time you spend with each other.
As our oceans are turned into a plastic soup, the air permeated with toxins, rainforest ecosystems destroyed by the football field, it never even begins to become partially apparent to us that this orgy of consumption could be detrimental to the future of our own children. The very children that we lavish with these plastic doohickeies and other related nonsense.
It will be a sad day when we wake up to ourselves and figure out that partaking in this corporate debauchery worked only to exacerbate ecological decline.
Merry Christmas and welcome to the wrong side of history.
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