Why I sometimes fall into despair...

I am an optimist at heart. I have to be to even want to to live in this insane world where we consume at a rate that we no is unsustainable. Everyone of us is well aware that the average westerner, particularly North American is ravaging this planet in a frenzy of consumption that makes the piranhas of the Amazon look like Buddhist monks.

Our oversized houses and vehicles are designed to contain our oversized egos and declining IQs. How else are we to explain our epidemic of obesity and pollution in a world in which over 20 million people live from meal to meal always near death from starvation? Meanwhile the ranks of the homeless swell every year. Our government wants us to beleive that these are the losers who simply fail to apply themselves and so naturally end up on the streets.

I almost hunger for the great cataclysm that will humble us all and reduce us to the level of subsistence that is the birthright of so many of our brothers and sisters. It is not as if we even need to look outside of our own borders here in Canada. The bitter legacy of colonialism has left so many indigenous people living in Third World conditions. For some so-called experts the answer is simple. It is their fault because they refuse to be assimilated so that they could live the great consumer dream.

This world does not need more consumers. This world needs abstinence. It need each of us to find the moral courage to accept our greater responsibility to all of humanity and to curtail this madness that is the consumer society. But if that fails I can at least take comfort in knowing that it will eventually collapse under its own bloated weight like the great rotten carcass it has become.

Please do not take this as some sort of anarchist rant. It is the despair of a moderate person who sees the possiblity of a far better world in which all of us get a fair and sustainable share of the resources of this planet - a hope denied by the avaricious consumption of his fellow citizens.