Black Friday

We pig out at Thanksgiving, rush to the stores to 'save' on the latest TVs and blenders and things we don't need, feverishly searching for presents to satisfy the ignoble expectations of greed in a season of hope, and get our brains muddled amongst our own warped ideas of this beautiful life.

The stores are decorated prettily with tinsel and bows, cheery ruddy faced spokespersons flash bright smiles on the airwaves, beckoning us to buy more, to address our insatiable desires for instant gratification, to want more, to want what only 1 percent of 3 percent of the world's population can afford, to have that perfect sanitized lifestyle that only soundstages and movie studios can produce.  We want our lives to be brightly wrapped packages, when in reality, they run amok with the stains of our inequities.

But we can! If we work hard enough and want it enough, we can realize our dreams!

I see a generation rising up.  Rising against lives spent in front of blue TV screens hawking gluttony and sloth, selling rotting fantasies that (once purchased) deteriorates into increasing bills, increasing guilt, increasing woes for the next 300 days of "as soon as I pay of my debts, I'm actually going to live the way I want", and increasing madness.  I see my generation breaking free from the shackles of same-ness, of cul-de-sacs lined with the same stony houses, beige cubicles with the same flickering screens with the same memos pushing to satisfy the bottom line, to satisfy their quests for more sameness: same self-motivated aspirations fed by the same propaganda from the same powers that be.

Of course, all of this is treated as humbug. But if we consume less, think more, then doesn't it seem that our lives, our world can be better? A quick glance at the UNDP Human Development Reports:

• 850 million people are malnourished
• 1 billion lack access to safe water
• 3,900 children die each day
• more than 2.5 billion live on less than $2/day