This is not going to be my usual rant.
I just saw a video that someone posted on Facebook.
Something called the Advent Conspiracy
Now even if you're not all that religious or are of a non-mainstream religion (Wicca, Pagan, etc)...they have a point. We spend 450 Billion dollars per year on Christmas. We shop, shop, shop, and spend, spend, spend...
And what do we get for all of that? Fulfillment? No, we get people snapping at each other for having the audacity to say Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Season's Greetings (or whatever they deem offensive) to one another. We get stressed the fuck out. We get to see people waiting in line for a constantly out of stock toy that a child could wait a week or two to get once the holiday rush is over. We even get to see people beating the shit out of each other just so they can have the one (1) advertised super sale item that a store is offering.
Jesus has got to be facepalming at all of this.
If you didn't want to watch the video, let me mention a very good point in all of this that it brought up. A lack of clean drinking water kills more people than anything else out there. I'm not sure that's true or not, but I do know that at least it's up there in the list of human-killing things...and pretty high on the list at that. The estimated cost of solving the world's clean water problem is around 10 billion. That's 1/45th of what we spend a year. If every American who shops for Christmas were to give $2.20 out of every $100 of what they were planning to spend, we could knock out the clean water problem.
Imagine what we could do for some of the other problems out there if we dropped $25 out of every $100 we were going to spend onto the world's problems.
And if we limit our gift spending to more modest levels and considered other gift ideas. Things made by hand and from the heart. Spending time with family at Christmas instead of letting the kids rip/shred/tear and then toddle off to play in front of the TV maybe we can reconnect to the next generation and guide them towards becoming decent human beings instead of the entitlement whores we read about on Customers Suck and Not Always Right.
Now their message is worship fully, spend less, give more, love more. Even if you're not into worship or worship differently, the message still stands with what's left.
If you are going to let your youngsters watch tv, then you need to teach them about the manipulation of their desires by advertisers. Sit through some ads and explain how that ad tried to make you feel insecure without their product, or how they are trying to make all kids want something. There are a ton of different ways we can cut back on mindless consumerism if we learned from a young age that ads are not our friends.
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