The world has Aids, and Cancer, and Diabetes. We have war and terrorism and corruption. All of these things take lives and impact countless others; people are brought to their knees preying and weeping over these things everyday in our country and the next. These things are real, we can smell them and touch them and feel their impact; everyone does. I can see something else, it’s barbed with deceit and so are the people who make it. Disease and war are not the only things threatening to obstruct our children’s way of life; there is a growing moral dilemma that I for one cannot stand and watch.

Consumerism is creating a public that is driven by one thing, spending. This sort of a public would chase a Dooney and Bourke purse if you tied it on a string and dangled it in front of their nose. Not only that, but this sort of a public would stand back and watch our planet melt away while scratching their chins, wondering why it happened. The amount that corporations, marketers and eventually consumers spend getting the things they want; and the price they pay for wanting so much is far too great for me to allow this disregard for rationale.

It became an addiction, and people began to get a “high” from buying things and spending money on them. This tendency revealed a weakness in the public that marketers didn’t hesitate to exploit. Never before has a public been so bombarded with advertisements and pitches. All of which are directly aimed at cleverly getting the consumer to spend more, no matter what the moral cost. It’s becoming so ingrained that a new generation of children are growing up who can instinctively tune out distractions. The marketers are always one step ahead, with things like “Channel 1″ that rob our kids of classroom time and force them to pay attention to the schemes of big business. They have terms like “mind real-estate” which actually refers to how much of our brain they can control.

Environmentalism is continuously ignored in the face of a society driven by such greed. There is no excuse for the blatant carelessness that we bestow upon the planet; as if destroying the earth is an acceptable price to pay in order to continue basing success on how much we own.

I believe that in all of this fuss, many Americans have lost sight of what the “American Dream” is and what it is worth. We cannot allow the future of our world to wither away because of an addiction. We need to re-evaluate our priorities as a public instead of letting the media and the politicians do it for us. Believe it or not, this is still a democracy so can we put away our “I’d rather be four-wheeling” license plates for a second while we work for a better way of life?