<It takes a LOT of money to only buy vegetarian entrees, organically-produced foods, rain-forest-free furniture, and the like.

Vegetarian entrees: peanut anything; pasta with no meat; roasted vegetables with rice.

Organically-produced foods: OK, it may be difficult to find hormone-free beef at a decent price, and urban dwellers will have a hard time keeping chickens. But organic vegetables are not that hard, unless you have no windows. They grow in pots

Rain-forest-free furniture: Pine. Maple. Birch. All fast-growing new-growth woods that grow in temperate climates. Often as weeds on the medians of the interstates in this part of the world.

It takes some thought, but it's not that hard.

What have you got against people speaking up against things they don't like?

Do you think the world would have been a better place if no one had gone after the tobacco industry? Do you think that the cigarette people would have eventually, because they are good folks, gone public with all the stuff they knew about how bad tobacco smoking is for smokers and just voluntarily gone out of business? 'Tis to laugh. They're still hanging on. They have a new lease on life (cough, cough) now that the Chinese (cough) market (hack hack) has opened up to them. Thank God there's no free speech there, huh?

Hey, I wanted to keep soda machines out of my kids' middle and high schools because they provide a cheap and easy way to get empty calories and a caffeine high in school while kids are developing their buying habits. The same school board that forbade the guidance counsellors from listening to a kid talk about his gender identity issues (because to admit the issue was to unduly influence children and present homosexuality as an "option") voted to let a substance with a known addictive drug -- let me testify to the addictive qualities of caffiene! -- and a national media machine be sold unsupervised in the schools. They said the children would not be influenced by the presence of soda machines. What was the payoff? The football field got a new scoreboard. It says "Coke", of course...

If people want to get a message of simplicity and less consumption out there, and you don't like it, hey, ignore them! You can do that, surely! If a bunch of adolescents can ignore a high-powered corporation with a massive advertizing budget, surely American adults can ignore Adbusters. I'm willing to bet that most of America has never heard of them, so ignoring them should be easy.

The rest of us can cherrypick the ideas we agree with. This is also a known strategy.

By coincidence, I came across a copy of their magazine (called Adbusters) for the first time today. The article I read had to do with the marketing of spirituality in Japan, specifically, the difference between rushing through a tour of the sacred spiritual sights of Kyoto, so one could check each off the scorecard and say one had "seen Kyoto", and living and working in a small place and drawing satifaction from the garden and from throwing pots to sell. The irony of rushing through a temple's garden of contemplation to get to the next thing on the list, rather than drawing from the garden that for which it was designed, is the essence of modern consumerism. It has nothing to do with satisfaction, and everything to do with moving on to the next sale. This is the point of the "Black Friday" protest as well. And (oddly) it's what a lot of churches, many very conservative, have been saying for many many years now. I think you miss the point, big time.

Maybe these "haters of prosperity" want to make simpler living into a more fashionable thing to do. Maybe their definition of prosperity is different from the definition favored by the corporations that underwrite so many of our political campaigns and other scoreboards. Maybe this is a new and different way to attack the welfare problem -- if people's needs can be defined by what they are happy with rather than what sales pitches tell them they must have, those needs might be easier for them to fill without outside aid. Did you ever think of that?

When conservatives speak up against things they don't like, that's free speech. When they organize, that's political activism. When liberals speak up against things they don't like, that's nascent dictatorship. When they organize, it's a threat to civilization. Have I about got this right?

Regards--
Mary Anne