the corporation

Did anyone watch “The Corporation” tonight? In some ways I hate shows like this–I come away feeling so guilty. So here I am trying to put together a magazine that has nice and mushy messages, trying to do my part to make a better world, but I’m feeding into the whole problem: the absolute wastage of paper, consumerism, marketing, soon I’ll be dealing with advertising. And all these negative associations make it hard for me to do what I need to do to make lip a sucess. Does lip make enough difference to justify the part it plays in capitalism? I have to believe it does, or can, or will.

All in all, I’m pretty good about not overconsuming, I think: a large portion of my clothes were bought used, a large part of my furniture at home is used, most of my books are used, I don’t buy much in the way of beauty or cleaning products…but I still like to shop and have pretty things and own the pretty things I see in the shops. I love to eat out, to drink coffee at cafes. And then there’s the stores like Homebase, Hot Dollar, The Reject Shop, etc. All these pretty things, cheap. Why are they so cheap there? What exploitation is going on to make those things cheap? Wouldn’t it be better to buy truly homemade, artist crafted beautiful things from artists and craftspeople rather than corporations? But they are expensive and its so hard to spend that much when I can get the same thing for totally cheap at the Reject Shop. I must try though. If I can’t stop consuming because I’m too weak at least I can continue trying to be more conscious about who I’m buying from.

But then sometimes I think what’s the point? Me consuming less is not going to change the world. But that’s a cop-out. The only way the world will ever change is by people thinking their personal actions will work. Actually, I don’t think the world will change, but it can never get even marginally better if noone takes absolute personal responsibility for its evils.

And maybe in the end, to some degree, the trade-offs are worth it (well, only for rich white people). Maybe it’s better to die of cancer but have lived with lots of good stuff that made you happy until you died. In the end the earth will recover whatever we do to it, but maybe its better to kill ourselves inventing, shopping, eating too much and entertaining each other than to save ourselves and stop experiencing new things. I think I’d rather die of cancer by 40 and have read hundreds of wonderful books, than live to a ripe old age without ever having read one. But if I never had read a book, I wouldn’t know what I was missing….