A Rant on Dependence and Me Scaring Birds
I feel like a bum. That’s right folks, a bum. Why, you ask? Let me explain why. First of all, we’re all consumers. We collect lots of stuff. We go to big stores and buy things, use them up, throw them away, or at least throw packaging away. We eat, we spend, we discard, and we complain about it the whole time. We go through so much stuff in our lives. Where did all this stuff come from? The food, plastic, clothes, computers, and everything else? We all produce as well, so we use each others’ stuff we made and it all evens out, right? Wrong. I don’t produce anything that people really need. And what I “produce”, information for a magazine, requires so much consumption anyways. The paper being used, the power to run the presses, or even my computer. The fuel I use. I am bumming even at work. Does what I do improve the lives of the people that provide what I consume? No. In fact, my work only worsens the problem. Then why do I do it? The only reason I do it is for money.
America is a great country, and we are very powerful. That power has partially come about because of the way each person’s role in society has broadened. Each person doesn’t grow their own crops anymore, we have a few people that grows lots of crops for everyone. And that’s cool, but it makes people very vulnerable as well. My pal Justin informed the internet via Bryan that although America uses 25% of the world’s resources, we also produce 25% of the world’s goods and services. We have gotten that way through mass production, where everyone has a niche but doesn’t know how to do anything else. We are all so dependent.
That dependence is part of what makes me feel like a bum. If I were in the middle of nowhere, I wouldn’t last two days. Even worse, if we all still had our homes and all our possessions, but suddenly the power cut off, the fresh clean water stopped always coming through the pipes, and the grocery stores and restaurants stopped magically having all the food we want, we would riot and kill each other. It would be very difficult to survive. Related question: what percentage of Americans do you think actually know the basics of farming and hunting? Everyone knows that you shoot the deer. But I’m talking about the steps between the dead deer lying on the ground and the deer’s nutrition in your stomach. I bet that it’s not that many. And in today’s society, maybe you don’t need to know that. It’s because we are relying on other people to take care of stuff like that for us.
Am I giving back what I am receiving? I get as much food, drink, and resources as I can pay for, and I push pixels around on a screen all day in exchange. I can’t help but think that someone’s getting screwed here, and it’s not me. The trade off doesn’t seem right, and that’s what makes me feel like a bum.
But now, to make sure this post isn’t too serious, I present me scaring birds:
And me scaring more birds:
