Fall 2007, Volume 11 Number 3

Table of Contents

It’s probably not Election Day as you are reading this, but chances are that you have already voted today, multiple times. Not because you engaged in election fraud, but because you engaged in consumption. Chances are, you paid a bill, filled up your tank with gas, or just picked up a bottled beverage at the corner store. So you made your voice heard.

Really? Well, yes. In our imperfect democracy, it often feels as though our voices are not being heard (didn’t we clearly say on the last election day that we wanted to end the war?), yet in our imperfect capitalist economy, we are constantly stating preferences for the kind of world we want to live in, whether we mean to or not. And because of this, each of us has more power than we are willing to acknowledge. Each of us has more responsibility than we are willing to fully inhabit.

We might complain about the Bush administration’s unwillingness to confront global warming; and then get into our big cars, alone, to drive to our newly constructed second homes, along a route that could conveniently be reached by train. We bemoan the crassness of our culture, then click on YouTube to see the latest celebrity meltdown. We don’t like pollution, but we keep buying those plastic water bottles and sticking them in the plastic bags that flutter in all our treetops.

Alternatively, when we shop at the farmers market or purchase a share in a CSA, we vote for better nutrition, less urban sprawl, healthy family farms and true homeland security. When we take our local power company up on its offer to provide our household’s energy in renewable form, we vote to give our climate a chance. When we resist our children’s pleas for the sugary beverage encased in an animal-shaped plastic animated movie advertisement, we vote against diabetes and obesity, and for true family values.

Somehow, Adam Smith’s famous hand is so invisible we often don’t even see it holding our own wallets, and we can easily disassociate from the impact of our consumer actions. This is especially true for the large number of people in this country whose grip on the American Dream is so tenuous that consumption of disposable (and often poisonous) goods seems to be the most vivid expression of that Dream available to them. It’s expensive to be poor, even/especially when there is so much stuff around that is so very cheap -- stuff that in turn holds our very lives to be cheap. In this country, and increasingly around the world, people can struggle tragically to pay for essential housing, health care, and education (whose costs have all risen astronomically in recent years, as incomes have stagnated) yet can always manage to find the solace (or the illusion of it) in the purchase of cheap designer knock-off sunglasses and cell phones.

It’s not just the kind of spending we engage in that sends a message, but the mind-blowing quantity. Infinite growth, it seems, is the only way to go. The people of this country have managed to buffer our economy through tough times with our insatiable need for stuff, and naturally our leaders have only encouraged this. We have shopped our way through the aftermath of 9/11 and the Iraq war, and economists could argue that our survival depends upon the insatiability of consumer spending that we are now spreading throughout the developing world. Yet our innate collective wisdom tells us the opposite – if we stop shopping and worrying to listen to it.

The elites of the West are now blessed with new consumer choices – we can spend a little more now and buy a better future – with hybrid cars, fair trade organic hemp jeans and biodegradable laundry detergent. These are great options if you can afford them, but we will need to take a hard look at quantity, not just quality of the goods we buy. It will take some adjustment, but we know it is time to start. Time to fully embrace the ethos of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Time to enjoy leisure in nature instead of at the mall. Time to acknowledge that we are being suffocated by stuff, that technology has taken away as much time as it has given us, and that our spirits are smothered by shopping lists and tacit competitions.

There has been a spiritual spasm across the world, with the deeper yearnings of Muslims, Christians, Jews and other Believers being exploited by political warmongers, and clergy who always have something to sell. That so many millions have been manipulated by perverse interpretations of holy texts does not erase the underlying, camouflaged fact: people are crying out for truth, simplicity, peace and time. We need to sooth our spirits by choosing a new – or really an ancient – path. We need to spend more time in reverence for creation and less in reverence for objects and machines. We need our economies to blossom with innovation and green solutions, and not continue to ride on endless production of weapons, inefficient machines and disposable plastics. We need to vote with our values, every day of the year.

Jen Chapin is a songwriter, singer, the former Chair/current Secretary of the Board of Directors of WHY (World Hunger Year) and a member of the KIDS Advisory Board. To hear her music and read more, see www.jenchapin.com

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