T’was the day before Christmas, and I
was out shopping, riding through town, store-to-store hopping. My Christmas Eve
ritual, with typically unique encounters: the shop owner who knows my wife and what
little piece of jewelry will please her; the Kentucky Street fiddler with whom
I play a few carols under the spotlight of the setting sun; the music store clerk
with great ideas for the boys in the garage band.
This is my friendly Ghost of Christmas Presents: quality
products, moderate in quantity and cost, small enough to tote in my Santa-red
bike saddlebags, chosen with care from merchant-neighbors, mostly from
locally-owned businesses. But the Ghost of Christmas Presents has a dark side,
too.
Does it bother anyone that our biggest holiday is celebrated
by mass consumption of material goods? Has materialism, the insatiable desire
for more stuff, become our religion? Measured by what gets our attention and
resources -- from the pre-Christmas piles of catalogues and ad supplements to the
post-Christmas piles of packaging – it seems that Jesus and the Santa-spirit of
giving are merely the wrapping paper; the real Christmas is the stuff in the
box. One of the saddest moments (and greatest lost opportunities) in recent
history is when our President suggested to Americans that, following the
September 11 terrorist attacks, we respond by going shopping. We are traumatically
stricken, and our leader tells us to consume. Did it ever occur to him that
consumption might be contributing to our trauma?
It’s no coincidence that consumption is also an old name for
tuberculosis; it describes how TB *wastes away* or *consumes* its victims. My son
asks, if we stop consuming, won’t it kill the economy? I tell him we need a new
economy, because *this* economy is killing *us*. It’s not just the many forms
of pollution and resource depletion, and the wars over these resources. It’s
what having this stuff does to our lives: the time spent getting and supporting
it: buying, maintaining, storing, moving, cleaning, fixing, powering, and replacing
it. Usually it’s time we *don’t* spend with the people in our lives, or getting
to know ourselves.
Rampant materialism is like a parasite. It will eventually
go away, either because we carefully drive it out of our system, or we allow it
to pollute and deplete and eventually kill us. But managing the cure shouldn’t
be so hard. We are not by nature “consumers.” After WWI, business leaders were
concerned that, since Americans had all the material essentials, there would be
nothing to drive economic growth. The solution: marketing, creating needs where
none had existed. Create a bottomless box of desire that Jesus (or Buddha or
Mohammed) could never hope to fill. (My nomination for the scariest image of
2004 was a National Geographic photo of a beautiful woman in a slinky dress at
Chinese auto show; she’s lovingly cradling a scale model of a new sports car.)
What to do? We can start by talking about it, with our
family, friends, co-workers. Share this column with them. Prepare them for next
Christmas by letting them know that a (much) larger portion of the gift budget
will be donated in their name to organizations serving people who are lacking
life’s most basic needs. Educate yourself about how our consumptive lifestyle
impacts the developing world (see www.adbusters.org/magazine/57/terrorists.php
for a powerful essay on this topic. American spending on cosmetics, pornography
and pet food alone, it says, could provide clean water, safe sewers and basic
health care to the world’s poor.)
Above all, you can use meditation and prayer to help fill
that box of desire. Explore your inner gifts, what you can offer in service,
compassion, and forgiveness. Start reducing your consumption, and let the
economy adjust. Share with neighbors. Grow your own food and energy, or buy it
from local suppliers. We may even be able to find common ground with the
political opposition. Can eco-liberals and evangelicals join together to
boycott companies using sex to sell products? Can simple, sustainable spiritual
living be common ground between “red” and “blue”?
In the end, let’s “live simply so that others may simply
live.” And have a happy new year!