What have we today

Again I begin with no plan, not even an inkling of what to say. I suppose if I read the news or other blogs, I'd have reactions to report. Ah, I remember a thread I've been wanting to weave into my verbal quilt.

Consumption driven by whimsical desire for gratification leads our culture down a cancerous path. Wow, that's a sentence huh? A cancerous path? I suppose I should be writing this in flipitoff, since that phrase is best explained by the quote in the matrix where Smith is pointing out to Morpheus that humans resemble cancer more than mammals. By way of illustration, allow me to develop this theme using happy meals, and I'm borrowing that particular branded term to represent all the childrens' meals that come with a toy. Typically those toys are made of plastic, and I suspect that few of those toys are played with for more than a day. How many millions of plastic toys in sealed plastic bags with ink printed on them are torn open by a child, then shortly after are discarded? Now the production of plastic is a pretty nasty process in terms of the toxics that are generated and added to the industrial waste stream. I doubt the ink is good for the environment either. Then off to the landfill with the minimally used item. I have this image of a machine excreting goop from its bottom into a mold, and the little robot turd is bagged, tagged and given to a child who plays with shortly then tosses it aside and it drifts into a huge mound of machine droppings. Can't even grow a garden with that shimmering pile. We have the toxicity of the production of these whimsical gratifiers and the two waste streams they enter. We also have the psychological implications of perpetual gratification of our children. I can only ponder the effect that these meal toys have on the psyche of our youth, and I'm not assuming it's all negative. It's that I believe that we the people of the industrial empire, particularly the inhabitants of the U.S. must cultivate a culture of frugality. We must consume less resources, and produce less waste. These happy meal toys are counter productive in both the material and psychological realms. We are encouraging our children to expect personal gratification in the form of a material item that does little more than promote consumption and produce waste. Many of these toys are associated with a motion picture and are simply a form of advertising to promote additional consumption. I think it's time for me to reread A Brave New World.

Ah, now I've written. It's time to read.